The case against conversational interfaces

> It was like they were communicating telepathically. > > That is the type of relationship I want to have with my computer!

The problem is, "The Only Thing Worse Than Computers Making YOU Do Everything... Is When They Do Everything *FOR* You!"

"ad3} and "aP might not be "discoverable" vi commands, but they're fast and precise.

Plus, it's easier to teach a human to think like a computer than to teach a computer to think like a human — just like it's easier to teach a musician to act than to teach an actor how to play an instrument — but I admit, it's not as scalable; you can't teach everyone Fortran or C, so we end up looking for these Pareto Principle shortcuts: Javascript provides 20% of the functionality, and solves 80% of the problems.

But then people find Javascript too hard, so they ask ChatGPT/Bard/Gemini to write it for them. Another 20% solution — of the original 20% is now 4% as featureful — but it solves 64% of the world's problems. (And it's on pace to consume 98% of the world's electricity, but I digress!)

PS: Mobile interfaces don't HAVE to suck for typing; I could FLY on my old Treo! But "modern" UI eschews functionality for "clean" brutalist minimalism. "Why make it easy to position your cursor when we spent all that money developing auto-conflict?" «sigh»

I think we can have the best of both worlds here. We want the precision and speed of using vi commands, but we want the discoverability of GUI document editors. LLMs may be able to solve the discoverability problem. If the editor can be highly confident that you want to use a given a command, for example, it can give you an intellisense like completion option. I don't think we've cracked the code on how this UX should work yet though -- as evidenced by how many people find cursor/copilot autocompletion suggestions so frustrating.

The other great thing about this mode is that it can double as a teaching methodology. If I have a complicated interface that is not very discoverable, it may be hard to sell potential users on the time investment required to learn everything. Why would I want to invest hours into learning non-transferrable knowledge when I'm not even sure I want to go with this option versus a competitor? It will be a far better experience if I can first vibe-use the product , and if it's right for me, I'll probably be incented to learn the inner workings of it as I try to do more and more.

> We want the precision and speed of using vi commands, but we want the discoverability of GUI document editors.

> The other great thing about this mode is that it can double as a teaching methodology.

gvim has menus and puts the commands in the menus as shortcuts. I learned from there vim has folding and how to use it.