All to figure out the singular most important thing: chat interfaces are the worst.
Having an LLM spell-checker that would autocorrect my spelling as I typed, based on the context of what I was typing? That would be magnificent.
It does have much more context to work with (open tabs, other files) vs. a single/short chat session.
Since it's just OpenAI's text completion model with a code finetune and without the chat/assistant RLHF, it works much better as an "advanced autocomplete" than ChatGPT or even OpenAI's Turbo model via their API. I can be much more surgical with how I use it (often accepting just a few words at a time), and it's good at following my usual tone.
Can’t agree more. As an user, a chatbot makes me think the company has put some kind of dumb parrot in front of me in order to avoid giving actual support.
There were search engines. Plenty. And indexes. And ... That wasn't it.
Every site had search. That also wasn't it.
The problem was that these things were incredibly low quality versions. Exactly what you're complaining about now with chatbot interfaces. In fact that these were such low quality is what made Google such an incredible opportunity: centralization came almost built in. They never needed to fight books.com: their search sucked. Even now finding a book using Google's interface works better than all search on the internet, except perhaps Amazon. And Amazon's "shittifying" it's search engine too now ...
Google was also never "the best". It was simply consistent quality that worked everywhere. And because all other search engines were pretty far along in their enshittification cycle, with MBA's unwilling to go back, nobody even made a serious attempt at fighting them. Except, perhaps, and very late to the party, Microsoft.
Google was better, but not incredibly better (and it's been going downhill for like 5 years now). It makes me think that if you could make something that would advise 10% of the world population on how to boil eggs, that would be incredible.
At my org we use a chatbot for pull requests — you get pinged by the bot when the PR is ready to merge, with a button in the chat interface that merges the PR — no need to open GitHub and locate the big green button yourself.
That won’t 10x your productivity or whatever, but it does make it slightly more pleasant.