Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

There is a black box effect between when you press enter and it starts updating code in multiple places. Like wtf just happened, I have to find these changes, which code broke dependencies. It should be more step wise visually

In VS Code Copilot you have to approve every change manually when you apply to from the chat.

Are you... not using git?

The next couple of years will be dedicated to working that out.

In some editors, like Windsurf, you will get git-like diff and you have to approve each change (or accept all in bulk, of course).

Aider + git makes this a non-issue. You can revert anything it does easily (even 5-10 steps down the line) and it shows you the code blocks it's changing in the chat UI as well.

rather months than years

Yes, more like it.