[karthink]

For a REPL-like interface, you could try the chatgpt-shell package. It can execute code generated by the LLM. It too does this by using org-babel though, it just calls org-babel functions under the hood. It's also OpenAI-only right now, although the author plans to add support for the other major APIs.

gptel has a buffer-centric design because it tries to get out of your way and integrate with your regular Emacs usage. (For example, it's even available _in_ the minibuffer, in that you can call it in the middle of calling another command, and fill the minibuffer prompt itself with the text from an LLM response.)