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?

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”.

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

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

Roseanne Barr says baby she gave up for adoption as a teen thought she was Goldie Hawn - Entertainment Weekly

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

NOT DATA … BUT MEANING!

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

What would happen if the US government told the British government in no uncertain terms all RAF bases with USAF personnel now must follow the Constitution and us law, and if the UK tried to defy this, the US military would directly attack the UK?

/ \ and ⁄ / | \

+ for

plus(a, b) for(i, 1, x, […])

Mars isn’t Red? The Planet is Actually… - The Daily Galaxy

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

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.

Power Rankings: Rocket Classic - PGA Tour

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.

in structures, such as: