So of course great kudos to the developers of Cursor, Antigravity, Windsurf, OpenCode and all the other editors. I’m personally using Cursor daily. But already for many months, I have been frustrated why they still operate on the level of lines of code. That seems so “last millennium” to me. Now that we have all these amazing data structures in computing, why are we not doing anything with them? Why are coding editors still working on the level of text instead of syntax trees? Or even more abstractly, couldn’t they work on the level of a cross-language notation?
Comments
So of course great kudos to the developers of Cursor, Antigravity, Windsurf, OpenCode and all the other editors. I’m personally using Cursor daily. But already for many months, I have been frustrated why they still operate on the level of lines of code. That seems so “last millennium” to me. Now that we have all these amazing data structures in computing, why are we not doing anything with them? Why are coding editors still working on the level of text instead of syntax trees? Or even more abstractly, couldn’t they work on the level of a cross-language notation?
Title implies that you know the secret, not that you are seeking it. Clickbait
But I do know the secret: It's going beyond lines of code, deeper into the functional structure of it