Why is every new AI IDE forcing a minimalist, "chat-first" UI on us?

If you don't like it, don't use it. There are plenty of established, traditional IDEs. New IDEs aren't born every day, of course the new stuff that comes out now is trying to cash in on the current AI hype and is targeting the "vibe coder" crowd. Arguably it's targeting a new audience which may never have used traditional IDEs, but may feel comfortable vibe coding an app through a chat interface. As an old fashioned coder, you don't have to jump on this new bandwagon; though feel free to do so if you wish. Whether this trend will actually last remains to be seen.

Is being an 'old fashioned coder' already a thing...?

I couldn't agree more, this was driving me nuts, especially the fact that only a few people are talking about this, this made me question my workflow.. but no

This "Old-Fashioned coder" is just a way for people to validate their "blind" development, and under no circumstances ( at least till now ) do I agree with this workflow

Depends, are you filling out punch cards?

But not seeing exactly what files are being manipulated under the hood is terrifying.

But seeing the files after they've been manipulated would be horrifying.

If you want to edit your code with AI assistance, use a "classic" IDE (like VS Code) with the Copilot chat window (or some AI plugin that uses a different backend). We already have classic IDEs, even with AI integration. You don't need a "new AI IDE" for that.

The "new AI IDE"s are indeed meant for people who do not want to deal with the code themselves, but use the chat agent to edit the application logic for them. So if you want the code to stay your code with a helping hand editing them, an "AI-first IDE" is just the wrong tool for you.

This is somehow similar to question like: "Why is every C++ IDE hiding the generated assembler code from me? I would like to see the code that actually gets executed by the processor." The answer in that case is that the programmer community decided that C++ is a better layer of abstraction to work on a software project than assembly code, but if you really need to, you can still invoke the debugger to switch to a disassembly view, or you can use the specialized "IDE" Compiler Explorer. Currently, humankind is experimenting whether there are legitimate use cases in which interface-through-chat-AI is a sensible way to deal with source code, and the experiment is still running.

We already have multiple flavors of "classic IDEs" with proven designes (like VS Code, Jetbrains, Visual Studio), so there is no need to try a new variant of the UI every month. Yet we do not have an established way on how to make the "best" AI-driven chatbot IDE, so there is a lot of experimentation going on, and different companies pitch their different designs against each other. I expect that when the "storming phase" for AI-driven IDEs is over, we will still have both kinds of dealing with code, but neither we will have new AI IDEs popping up every month, nor we will have classic IDEs popping up every month.