eipiguy / graphchat

Planning

It's time to start thinking a little more critically, and try to plan this out in advance. It's grown too much to make it able to evolve "organically" with just me anymore.

So. Planning is about resource management. What desires to we have, and how do we want to use our resources to accomplish them?

Influences

• LLMs are amazing, but suck at switching between prompts or organizing/editing your history or train of thought.
  • In fact every chat app sucks at organizing threads.
  • Slack is best, but still only goes one level deep on messages threads
  • Literally everyone absolutely ignores effective replies or combining messages into larger response topics
• What doesn't suck at organizing? Filing systems.
  • Gnome's file explorer isn't bad: tabbed browsing, panels. A bit clunky though
  • A file path so you can look at where you are to begin with and to copy/paste directly.
  • more program/script access with right click like windows
• Folding, ranking, and associated peripheral view (what did other people say) that comes with forums, eg. Reddit or IDEs, eg. VSCode.
  • tree represented by indentations
  • simple to see and understand: familiar

Differences

• button style replies like in Slack:
  • only appears on hover?
  • 3 programmable hotkey reply buttons and buttons to other potentials
• Hotkey to terminal (ctrl+l)
• Highlighting message equivalent of the "code path" or "comment chain"

Goals

Things that can be realistically accomplished.

High Level

What needs are there? What am I trying to accomplish?

• Chain of Thought path UI: creation, navigation, and analysis
• Messages as directed graphs, not trees. Distill
  • what's the difference? merging of messages
  • not just multiple replies to a single message
  • messages that are "responses" to multiple messages as "influences"
  • how to force and encourage systematically?
• How to keep a conversation on topic.
  • What are the current topics?
  • How do they tie together?

Practical

• indented replies
• right aligned indented list with "topics" below the "bullet points" rather than above
• folding
• path highlighting
• peripheral message vision like forums
• Panels for specific tasks (One task per panel?)

Open Questions

• How to enable easy message grouping/linking for new topics?
  • Ie ancestry editing rather than descendant editing (replies)
  • I've been into drag-and-drop lately. Is that applicable here or am I making everything a nail?

Task Tree

Evaluation