This is a UI/UX problem, no? While the current suppliers are mostly locked in the ‘chat for everything’ mode. Guess what, we didn’t go to the moon in chat mode, we don’t drive cars via chat and cyborgs don’t play chess that way. Domain specific interfaces are the way to go (opinion).

Edit with an example: Read some interesting science news yesterday regarding man made risk of high water (Nature). Mailed the author, found the article (popular news doesn’t do attribution) and data and code was open source. Claude Fable had it running very fast and explained the things I forgot from high school. Started on localization and adding some methods from my background (econometrics, extreme value theory). All nice in the /hobby/ way. I can overlap fields in hours now. A brilliant feeling (but probably not brilliant).

What I cannot do is assess the value and novelty of the created work on my own. So I still need to have a set of geologists and econometricians / actuaries work through ‘my work’. That’s what we need tools for! We need UI/UX in this case for novel fields interacting with quality controls made easy. I currently wouldn’t dare ask the author for her time based on my slop. And I cannot critically assess what I’ve made. I only learned today that Greenlands ice attracts water, that Manila and other cities are sinking due to exhaustion of their aquafiers and that the North Sea is surge heavy and unique that way.

I recently found llm-buddy (https://github.com/ahyatt/llm-buddy) which might be a good fit.

Llm-buddy is an “Emacs package that watches your recent buffer edits and asks an LLM to review them. When it finds something worth pointing out, it can add a short inline note in the relevant buffer or show a message in a popup buffer (it usually does the former).

The goal is lightweight feedback while you work: typos, logic mistakes, questionable edits, or prose issues that a normal compiler, linter, or spell checker may not catch.”

I think "without being obtrusive" is a key point here, because any type of popups in the midst of working would break flow as well. Fixing compiler warnings is flow-inducing because it's very linear and has a fast feedback loop, so it would have to be something akin to that.

Side-note, I wonder if audio cues would work well here. When another person is commenting on something, we as humans can typically remember their point while still being focused on text, but if a popup with text comes up we usually get distracted by it. Just my two cents.

I've found AI code reviews as a first pass on PRs to be quite non-obstructive to my workflow and the AI code reviewer (while not instantaneous) is certainly faster on a response than the human pass will be.