> I disagree about the success of chatbots, if the problem is narrowly-defined and chosen properly.

If you can narrow the problem down, then you could design a much better interface for it than a text box and free form text (unless that's the better solution).

As for as AI assisted engineering goes, the thing is that after some time with a project, you already have much of the workflows and routines nailed down as scripts and other various combinations of tooling. And unless it's spaghetti code, you will have various snippets you can copy from for new code. The one thing I've observed about AI projects is that there's often little technical design coherence about them. It's always a kitchen sink of technologies and practices.

> If you can narrow the problem down, then you could design a much better interface for it than a text box and free form text (unless that's the better solution).

Yes, I agree, in that the chatbot we built probably would have worked just as well with a traditional UI, and would have been done a lot faster. But it would have been a lot less sexy (actually important for the bottom line!) and there are future directions that could take advantage of the conversational interface that’s potentially better than a traditional UI.

On the down side, good chatbots are really frikkin difficult to write. These things (LLMs) are not reliable at scale. The basic functionality came together in weeks. Getting it to behave consistently and obey guardrails took months, and even then we had to accept a low level of failed conversations.