[sitkack]

> Text inputs have no affordances

It has all the affordances. You can turn it into anything you want. Want it respond with json, check, it can do that. Turn a wall of text into a Python data structures, check, it can do that too.

You can take your LLM text interface and put what ever api you want on top. You start with clay and mold it into anything you need. You construct a parser so that the way data is already constrained and validated. Same goes for the output.

[tdaltonc]

Whether you want to call it an "empty set" or "the set of all possible sets" isn't really relevant to the authors point that an empty box has discoverability problems.

[sitkack]

I regret posting. The article itself is a trap. As a developer, the chatbot interface is everything to everyone, as a developer. The application user of course needs a rich interface with affordances.

I am not arguing that the chat interface is everything to everyone from a design perspective. I do think that as UI workbenches improve the need for a dedicated application will nearly disappear though. Applications will become a 1-5 page specification, including the UI.

[kmtrowbr]

I thought this was a funny statement too. Text is the most powerful, original medium. It's difficult to overstate how powerful and valuable it is. Of course, text won't necessarily be the only UI exposed for interacting with these "Large Language Models." But that UI can be built on top of the text -- which wouldn't work in the other direction.

[alanbernstein]

I think the point is that a "chatbot" is, by (the author's) definition, a UI with only a bare text prompt. Once you start building more UI on top of that, you're ... doing what the article suggests.

[kmtrowbr]

I see -- my apologies I must not have read it closely enough! :blush:

[sitkack]

I re-read the post. The author is arguing against a statement that no one made and then uses the rest of the essay to outline their work. It is a bit of a setup.

An LLM-Chatbot is an extremely flexible tool, but I haven't seen anyone argue that all of our UIs and applications should be replaced by chat. That is ridiculous.

[JusticeJuice]

I dunno, I think his point is very valid. Chat bots can't do literally anything at all, and an empty text input isn't going to help guide a user towards what it can do, and what it's good at. Just because a system has a LLM to interact with it, doesn't mean it'll suddenly support any desired action the user wants done.

[zmmmmm]

Yeah this was so weird to read. This is probably the number one property I think makes interfaces like ChatGPT compelling - you don't need to know how to use it - just use the human language you already know. If you don't understand something it says, just ask it to explain it. Essentially, it makes affordances obsolete.

[disconcision]

> Text inputs have no affordances

>It has all the affordances.

these are two different ways of saying the same thing

[lxgr]

But what if I don't know what I want?

A graphical UI can provide much more and much more intuitive guidance than a chat input ever will. And I say that as a big fan of Unix and the shell.

[IanCal]

You can ask it. You can explain your problem and ask how it might be able to help. You can discuss and narrow down with some back and forth what it is you want to do.

I could tell a chat bot I am finding the horizontal split in my editor is annoying because I have a wide monitor, and have it tell me there's a setting for that and ask if I want the default changed.

With a gui I might have to go through the files menu for settings, check if it's in edit-preferences, check tools-options, before maybe having to find out online it's if it's in some settings file.

[lxgr]

> You can discuss and narrow down with some back and forth what it is you want to do.

To be honest, I find systems that support only this kind of interface infuriating.

Imagine arriving in an unknown city: Being able to ask helpful locals for directions is nice, but sometimes I just want to look at a map.