Comment by fennecfoxy
17 hours ago
Nah natural language interfaces are great. What shit is most implementations.
Natural language MUST be mixed with traditional UIs. Our world is filled with new software, new features, new concepts every day even for a regular person and certainly much more for developers than almost anyone else.
The thing I find most helpful with this sort of thing is "where the fuck is that settings" and "how do I get it to/I want to do x" navigating complex UX that is so feature filled that even the very best UX designers just can't hack it.
I feel like in many of these cases sure, let me use the regular UI. But also being able to ask "Hey, can I set my background to an image, where do I do that?" and being presented with the dedicated UI, or behind the scenes tool calls if no UI available.
Anecdotally: things I use ALL the time are, Help->Search on MacOS toolbar, cmd+shift+P menu in VSC, the search in Android settings, etc.
Ubuntu's Unity had that. IDK about Gnome, but users are saying that the search options for it are a joke. With Ubuntu's Dash you could search even in menu items from a running application.
I wonder if anyone can brink Unity back to Trisquel...
EDIT: not Dash, but HUD.
I'm a CWM (calm window manager) guy, but the Dash concept is not that far to my usage in CWM:
win key+a = launch software with autocomplete win key+s = search between the open windows
And so on, but searching in the menus (and maybe semantically with sinonyms) it's superior to anything else, and no LLM it's required.