Backstory - I started experimenting with AST editing ideas after getting frustrated with my editor's lack of understanding of the structure and meaning of code, ie. the editing primitives all dealt with text and simple changes to the code often required repetitive manual text edits that had nothing to do with the meaning of the change. I went through a couple of prototypes and landed on the idea of augmenting a standard editing interface with a new mode that works on a simplified representation of the structure, which basically follows indentation levels - blocks of code like functions, loops, etc, can be moved and manipulated as units, and there are specific editing commands for the different elements.

The main idea is to design all of the editing and navigation commands around the thought processes (instead of designing around a data structure, which I think is where traditional editors have gone wrong), so that it feels natural and intuitive to use - like something that's been designed for what editing code actually involves, as opposed to a text editor that's had lots of code intelligence stuff added on top of it.