As a possible example of this, I was kind of baffled how quickly we're all now throwing the sophisticated AST/program analysis and refactoring methods over board we already had before AI. Just look at the refactoring methods of Eclipse or IntelliJ.
I think those should be very useful, especially with AI: Either as a tool for the agents themselves - why spend heaps of tokens completely rewriting a code file, if you could do most of it by calling some global refactoring operations on the IDE's AST/symbol database?
Or side-by-side with it, to give human users better insight what the AI did.
Instead it seems to be all VSCode (if at all) + grep + AI agents, and nothing else.
"Code Mode", where the AI writes a little program or script to do the AST/symbol transformations sounds like the win. As you point out, less tokens, and gives the humans insight.
I think those should be very useful, especially with AI: Either as a tool for the agents themselves - why spend heaps of tokens completely rewriting a code file, if you could do most of it by calling some global refactoring operations on the IDE's AST/symbol database?
Or side-by-side with it, to give human users better insight what the AI did.
Instead it seems to be all VSCode (if at all) + grep + AI agents, and nothing else.