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Devil's advocate, the worst-case scenario is really bad, and would probably be common: A random button your pointer is unintentionally hovering on stays put while the rest of the page wildly formats around it, super-janky UX.

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Yeah, it would need to be designed and tested carefully. Rather than formatting around things, I would probably be fine with something simple like overlaying the previous layout in a small disk area under the cursor. So if a button shifts down, you'd see it shift down, but there would be a copy of it still under your cursor, which would fade on its own after a short period.

Alternatively, we could disable clicking/selecting anything that wasn't visible for at least 200 or 300 ms at that location. So if you try to click on a button and it's shifted down or something pops up in front, and you end up clicking on that instead, your cursor would just blink red.

As someone similarly frustrated by these UI shenanigans, I’m impressed with how well thought-through your idea is. It sounds reasonable! Probably not that hard to implement either. Could it be a mere vibe-coding session away from existence?

While this may look like shit, I don't actually think this is all that bad a scenario. It's a better worst-case scenario than the 'button moved right into/away from my cursor' scenario.

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