Amelia Wattenberger describes why Chat based interfaces are not the future:
“Good tools make it clear how they should be used. And more importantly, how they should not be used. If we think about a good pair of gloves, it’s immediately obvious how we should use them. They’re hand-shaped! We put them on our hands.”
With chat, on the other hand, the burden of figuring out what works lies with the user. Some people like to use ChatGPT as a Google search replacement, others use it as a writing partner, some people treat it as a therapist, others rely on it for facts. The interface offers no clues as to which of these tasks it does best. We can learn what kind of prompts work well over time, but these clues could also just be baked into the interface.
Most people don’t know what they want. Austin Henley points out that a chat interface puts all the burden on the user to articulate good questions. What to ask, when to ask it, how to ask it, to make sense of the response, and then to repeat that many times.
Josh Pitzalis 