alt Hacker News> A tool is not meant to be the object of our attention; rather the tool should reveal the true object of our attention (the thing the tool acts upon), rather than obscuring it
I think this is true of AI agents. What is the object of our engineering attention? Applications, features, defect resolution. Not code.
Author here: yeah, this is a good point and something I think about even outside the context of agentic coding.
I've also tinkered with this idea myself in the context of prompt engineering with my Grace Browser project (https://trygrace.dev/), which converts code to an equivalent dynamic web form live within your browser.
I do think it's useful to remember that code is not the end goal and is itself just another mediated interface to the actual goal: the product your building. However, I think even if you cut code out of the picture the chat interface is still not necessarily the right interface for building a product. A great example of how to build a non-chat interface to product building (predating the AI boom) is Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle talk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUv66718DII) and there might be ways we can refresh the ideas in that talk for the AI era (although I still don't have any specific thoughts along those lines yet).