A buddy of mine and I wanted to experiment with such a thing back in ~'85. I started by looking at the "elvis" editor code, trying to wrap my head around it, but I didn't really have a clear picture in my head about what a "modal AST editor" would do, just some vague ideas of an editor that operated on parsed syntax (AST wasn't on the horizon for us at that point). I was in HS at the time, and my buddy was working on a masters thesis, I think he was too busy and it was way too big a project for me to handle at that point.

One interesting thing about GPT&cetera is that in order to "cheat" by using it, you need to clearly describe the problem you are trying to solve. If we can get more people to design before coding begins, I think we're going to have a win in any case.

It’s a very interesting space. There are several experimental editors out there - they’re all rough as you might expect, but the possibilities are fun to think about.

I’m building a semi-structured editor for UI - I’ve described it as “vim for designers.” Just as an example of how varied the general idea can be.

I'm worse, I have thought about this many times but never did anything with the idea. My respect for the authors for actually trying to materialize it.