What are your thoughts on a future where code is represented as a structured model, rather than text? Do you think that AI-powered coding assistants benefit from that?

Most coding assistants — with or without “modern “AI” — also do reasoning and manipulation of structures.

a b i 1 x []

It’s important to realize that “modern “AI” doesn’t understand human level meanings any better today (in many cases: worse!). So it is not going to be able to serve as much of a helper in a general coding assistant.

‘Gas station heroin’ is technically illegal and widely available. Here are the facts - AP News

i.e. “operator like things” at the nodes …

plus(a, b) for(i, 1, x, […])

NOT DATA … BUT MEANING!

The $5 trillion company: Wall Street got more bullish on tech stocks this week - MarketWatch

/ \ and ⁄ / | \

First, it’s worth noting that the “syntax recognition” phase of most compilers already does build a “structured model”, often in what used to be called a “canonical form” (an example of this might be a “pseudo-function tree” where every elementary process description is put into the same form — so both “a + b” and “for i := 1 to x do […]” are rendered as

in structures, such as:

Kristin Davis Set The Record Straight On Whether She Dated Chris Noth - BuzzFeed

Another canonical form could be Lisp S-expressions, etc.

+ for

A slogan that might help you get past the current fads is:

Do you consider yourself pretty?

These structures are made precisely to allow programs to “reason” about some parts of lower level meaning, and in many cases to rearrange the structure to preserve meaning but to make the eventual code that is generated more efficient.

Long ago in the 50s this was even thought of as a kind of “AI” and this association persisted into the 60s. Several Turing Awards were given for progress on this kind of “machine reasoning”.