the question is, how do you want to provide instructions for what the AI is to do? You might not like calling it "chat" but somehow you need to communicate that, right? With aider you can write a comment for a function and then instruct it to finish the function inline (see other comments). But unless you just want pure autocomplete based on it guessing things, you need to provide guidance to it somehow.
I don't know exactly, but I guess in a more declarative manner rather than anything. Maybe we set goals/milestones/concrete objectives, or similar, rather than imperatively steer it, give it space to experiment yet make it very easy to understand exactly what important tradeoffs everything is doing.
It's all very fluffy and theoretical of course.