AI should be present, not summoned
The chat box makes you stop and decide what to ask. An ambient layer reads the room instead.
The chat box is the wrong mental model. Every time I open one I stop what I'm doing and decide what to ask, and that pause is where most of the value gets lost. The agent literature makes a distinction worth taking seriously: an agent perceives its environment, decides, and acts — it doesn't wait to be addressed. Most shipped products ignore this. A sidebar or modal is a secretary you have to schedule, and for most people in most workflows that scheduling overhead is enough friction to kill the habit. Ambient presence is the alternative: not a persistent chatbot in the corner, but a layer that tracks what you're already doing and acts when useful instead of when prompted. The toggle in this piece makes it literal — same document, same paragraph being rewritten, but one state opens a modal over the work and pulls the cursor away, and the other leaves the work untouched and adds a small marker in the margin. The summoning pattern persists because it maps to how we used to think about software: invoke a tool, the tool does a thing. Agents that perceive and act don't fit that frame. Deciding what an agent should notice, what it shouldn't, and where the threshold sits between helpful and noisy is the actual product.