You’ve got a couple of ideas colliding here, let me try to unpack them.
First, most of the major players already have their own models or have been developing them for some time. Your take feels a bit reductive. Take Windsurf pre-acquisition, for example, their risk was being too tightly coupled to third-party vendors. It’s only logical to assume that building task- or language-specific models will ultimately help reduce costs and offer more control.
As for the other point: in my experience, trying to fully leverage LLMs actually makes me more prescriptive in my designs. I spend more time thinking through architecture and making my code modular, more so than when I wasn’t using an LLM. I’m sure others may design less or take shortcuts, but for me it’s pushed the opposite behavior. Is it the “right” way? I’m not sure, but I’m enjoying it and staying productive.
I think the point is that the UX favors accepting code changes as the primary action, rather than using the chat interface as an ideation tool. It's quite valid, because as a user of all these tools, Winsurf and Cursor very much do try to make you slap the Accept button uncritically!
Does it though? I use the chat option quite a bit in the tools. The only UX that favors accept pattern is tab which makes sense.
It does. Defaults matter, and the defaults for these tools are agent mode with code changes meant to be accepted, rather than forcing you to read the code and manually apply those changes.
Note: I'm not saying that's a bad thing! It's significantly more convenient for many use cases, so I can see why it's a default. But the incentive being created is to accept first, analyze later.