I like zed's approach, where the whole discussion is a plain text file you can edit as any text, which gives you the ability to change anything in the "discussion" regardless if it was generated by you or the llm. It makes stuff like that much simpler, ie you can correct simple stuff in the llm's response without unecessary back and forths, you can just cut parts out of the discussion to reduce context size or guide the discussion where you actually want removing distractions etc. I don't understand why the dominant approach is an actual, realistic chat interface where you can only add a new response, or in best case create "threads".
> I don't understand why the dominant approach is an actual, realistic chat interface where you can only add a new response, or in best case create "threads".
I'm not 100% sure either, I think it might just be a first-iteration UX that is generally useful, but not specifically useful for use cases like coding.
To kind of work around this, I generally keep my prompts as .md files on disk, treat them like templates where I have variables like $SRC that gets replaced with the actual code when I "compile" them. So I write a prompt, paste it into ChatGPT, notice something is wrong, edit my template on disk then paste it into a new conversation. Iterate until it works. I ended up putting the CLI I use for this here, in case others wanna try the same approach: https://github.com/victorb/prompta
I wonder if people in general would have a healthier understanding of LLMs if this mode of interaction was more common. Perhaps it would be more clear that the LLM is a very souped up autocomplete, instead of some other mind to debate.
Yes I think the same. It really felt demystifying the experience for me when I first tried zed, and I already had that belief about LLMs. But when you use an LLM through a normal chat interface, it feels different, and they are also tuned to feel that way, like talking to somebody. Maybe this is why this approach is avoided by those who have some stake on AI, even if it is better UX.
