Designing Axon's editor UI
Most developer tools look like they were designed by engineers. That's not a criticism — it's an observation. When you're building something technical, it's easy to prioritize function over form.
With Axon, we made a deliberate decision early on: the editor UI should feel as considered as the product it's helping you build.
The challenge of inline UI
The hardest part of designing an AI coding tool isn't the suggestion itself. It's the chrome around it.
How do you show a suggestion without breaking the developer's flow? How do you surface an error without being intrusive? How do you present an AI fix in a way that feels helpful, not alarming?
We went through a lot of iterations on this. Early versions of Axon used popups, sidebars, modal dialogs. All of them felt wrong. They interrupted. They demanded attention at the wrong moment.
The version we ship today uses inline UI almost exclusively. Suggestions appear where your cursor is. Errors highlight the affected line. Fixes slide in from the bottom of the editor. Nothing jumps out at you.
The role of color
Color in a code editor is a loaded topic. Developers have strong opinions about their themes, their syntax highlighting, their color schemes.
We use color sparingly in Axon's UI. Green means good. Red means something needs attention. Yellow means a suggestion is available. That's almost the entire palette for interactive elements.
This simplicity is intentional. In an environment already full of colored syntax, adding more color creates noise. Less color means the color that exists carries more meaning.
What we're still working on
The UI is never done. We're currently working on better ways to show agent progress for long-running tasks, a cleaner way to handle multi-file suggestions, and improved accessibility across the board.
If you have opinions about how Axon looks and feels, we genuinely want to hear them.