It's funny to me that instead of moving existing tech to a word in word out paradigm, people are dropping millions getting the chat to work with the existing paradigm.

Probably inevitable, but seems like a lot of disruption could happen there.

My personal hot take is that the product people (engineers too probably) at these companies are just straight up lazy. Yes, a new UI paradigm is hard, but it's been painfully obvious that chat just absolutely sucks. It's also obvious that some DSL-ish thing is possible, something that just does token juggling and the end-user sees some UI behavior.

I know this all sounds abstract. I've been mulling over it for the past year and it's very hard; and LLMs are super janky and inconsistent so it's 100% not trivial. So in some sense I understand why a lazy bottom-of-the-barrel "chat interface" has become the de facto standard.

We have all that? I'm still copying and pasting off the WebUI of ChatGPT.

Traditional and boring works for me.

> The moment someone figures out a new modality for LLMs is when we’ll see the next hockey stick.

Honestly, that fills me with fear. LLMs exist to make money to their companies, and said companies are not gonna turn around and say, "you know what, go are going to make an android for each elderly person, that can not only help them with their medications, but that can actually make their medications, tailored to their biologies." Instead, they are going to go for the low-handing fruit of "you know Bob, the guy who makes jokes in meetings but who is grumpy about delivery timelines? Well, we are going to make an android to replace Bob. MetalBob will make even better jokes. The blue model will be able to explain in excruciating level of detail why timelines aren't reasonable. The red model will walk through the cubicles with a whip to ensure everybody keeps working all the time, and nobody goes to pee."

Perhaps we could see a Yahoo Pipes style interface and feature set, handled by LLM (when simple transforms aren't an option).

Why would I want that for a form with buttons?

It sounds painful to debug

Gemini has something kind of like this. In a chat, click on the "..." icon next to one of Gemini's responses and select "Branch in new chat".

It creates a new chat which has the conversation up to that point and a link to the conversation you branched it from.

The UI isn't tree-like, though. It's more like Git where each branch name is just mixed in with the rest of the soup of references.

I'm not affiliated, and did not actually try it, but your comment reminded me of the juggler coding agent, discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48883305

>Each conversation is a Yjs CRDT tree. It can branch into sub-threads (recursively), and you can drill down, backtrack, edit, undo/redo, and inspect everything: tool calls, approvals, and the raw context JSON going to the model, etc.

I solved this with task management and got work trees.

The downside of course is branching in got, but I usually don’t go of course more then a handful of tasks.

I had to engineer my own ticket management to keep opus on target. It’s been great for managing work, history, audit trails and commits are tagged with the task id.

I implemented subtasks to deal with the way Claude likes to stage its own objectives.

Then I made enforcement logic in the task manager so tasks can’t be closed out until reviewers have consensus on the same sha.

The adhd that is Anthropic demanded I build it and now I’m knocking out issues faster than Batman.

Yes this would be very useful. Or at least being able to selectively compact a linear part and continue from before.

Often times I just sort of wish to undo.

You can do that right now in ChatGPT? Every answer has a "Branch in new chat" button. You can go back to any point and branch again.

Doubling the tediousness does not solve the interface problem.

Can you give examples of wrapped LLM logic?

API calls are expensive and slow, so I’ve shied away from integrating them into my personal projects. And of course there’s always the risk of hallucination.