Explore minimal presentation of tools

[Tyriar]

I want to investigate how chat feels of tool ui is really minimal. All tools could then expand on click to expose richer information. The task tool progress is a good example of what I have in mind where it changes the inline text multiple times as it's progress changes.

FYI @bpasero, @connor4312, @meganrogge, @justschen

[connor4312]

@hawkticehurst is planning to do a "swarm" on chat widgets next month to align consistency across the various components, I suggest making changes here part of that (maybe we start the swarm on tool calls early)

[Tyriar]

Here's a mockup of the basic idea I had in mind.

Current:

Proposal:

Notes:

• Make tool call text terse, try keep it to 1 line
  • Notice that the terminal tool call at the bottom is very minimal, maybe this should be the description of what the command does from the model
• All tools can be clicked to drill into details, this would reveal the rich widgets like the terminal one
  
  
  • Since we hide tool call details by default, we can make it even more rich without worrying about cluttering things as much. One example is to enable drilling in of all tool calls until the raw text is there.
• File edits could also be treated in the same way (maybe also remove border?)
• Since there's no chevron to expand, it feels more intuitive that all can be expanded
• Less margin between tool calls
• Icons (all 16x16, using the smaller debug circles in mockup for best rendering)
  • Circle outline means successful call
  • Circle filled means in progress, could be blue, have a pulse animation or shimmer on text. Alternatively could be a spinner, though it would probably look best if it was the same size as the other circles
  • Other circle icons could represent failure states
• The line between circles is optional, but sort of represents a train of thought between breaks to talk. Here's what it looks like without that
  

[bpasero]

@Tyriar yeah this is a direction to discuss, maybe in UX? I am not entirely sure about the icon use, I would generally stay away from introducing a new icon for indicating progress, other than our spinner.

Overall I like:

• 1 style to indicate anything that is non-output for the user (tool calls, thinking, etc)
• a way to optionally drill in to see more behind the scenes
• indicating when something is in progress vs. done vs. failed

[Tyriar]

Feedback on the above in the UX sync was generally positive and this type of thing has been explored by UX as well. Some notes:

• Should we show icons for tool calls?
  • It's arguable whether icons are needed at all unless the user is drilling into the tool calls which is an edge case
  • We want to try minimize noise in chat, removing icons is one way to do this
• Mixed feedback on the more abstract circle icon styling
• Should thinking also be collapsed by default?
• Progress can be shown by updating the single label inline, the tasks tool does something like this now