Software moving the mouse cursor is only acceptable when the window is full-screen. If the user makes an application go full-screen, they are opting out of the normal desktop UI conventions. It's expected that full-screen software completely takes over the UI, and there are legitimate uses for moving the mouse cursor in full-screen software, e.g. centering an invisible cursor every frame in a first-person shooter game so endless view rotation is possible. But if it's windowed then it should be impossible.

I would not be happy with mouse pointer hijacking. Seems to belomng in the same territory as scroll-hijacking but worse. The example case here could have been served by simply highlighting the area of interest in the UI with a red circle or a flashing pointer, whatever does the trick -- even though that may be distracting too.

There are a lot of interactions on a PC where user inputs land in the wrong place.

Claude Code and Codex in their various avatar allow us to type the next prompt while the aget is still working and responding on the earlier one. But this constantly runs into a permission prompt from running session -- either interrupting or worse entering a response to the permission prompt unintentionally. Even during normal prompting slash commands interfere annoyingly with normal use of the slash key (i use a slash to indicate a list of two or more choices sometimes when i write).

Permission popups and confirmation dialogs that appear unexpectedly and swallow our keystrokes, spacebar and enter key hits mid sentence have always annoyed me.

Laggy devices, and resource hungry sluggish UIs compound this problem.

In the early days it was pretty common to move the pointer to the active element when one started navigating with the keyboard.

But yeah, it feels like somebody physically grabbing your hand and moving it.