Comment by diggan
6 days ago
Maybe it's contrarian, maybe it's not, but I don't think Chat UIs are well suited for software engineering/programming at all, we need something completely different. Being able to branch conversations and such would be useful, but probably not for the way I do software. Besides, I'm rarely beyond 3 messages (1 system, 1 user, 1 assistant) in any usage of the chat UIs. Maybe it's more useful to people with different workflows.
I don't see how you'd avoid using chat if you need the bot to work on some bug end-to-end. I usually have many rounds in a chat session, first asking it to identify the overall approach, reviewing and approving that, then one or more rounds for coding, and several more to request edits as needed.
If you only ever ask it for trivial changes that don't require past context to make sense, then chat is indeed overkill. But we already have different UX approaches for that - e.g. some IDEs watch for specially formatted comments to trigger code generation, so you literally just type what you want right there in the editor, exactly where you want the code to go.
Yeah, I'd agree you want to iterate, but I'm not sure the UX of "Log of messages, where some of yours, some are tool calls, others are the assistant" and the workflow of "Add more messages into the log of messages"/"Change existing messages" is the right broad UX for this type of work.
I'm sorry I can't substantiate it more than that, as my own head is still trying to wrap itself around what I think is needed instead. Still, sounds very "fluffy" even when I read it back myself.