Comment by miki123211

I think we should use ASTS more, not for performance, but for easier code review.

Changes that are primarily code refactorings, like breaking up a large module into a bunch of smaller ones, or renaming a commonly-used class, are extremely tedious to review, both in LLM generated diffs and human-written PRs. You still have to do it; LLMs have a habit of mangling comments when moving code across files, while for a human, an unassuming "rename FooAPIClient to LegacyFooAPIClient" PR is the best place to leave a backdoor when taking over a developer's account. Nevertheless, many developers just LGTM changes like this because of the tedium involved in reviewing them.

If one could express such changes as a simple AST-wrangling script in a domain-specific language, which would then be executed in a trusted environment after being reviewed, that would decrease the review burden considerably.

I believe that with agentic development, the most important constraint we have is human time. Making the LLM better and faster won't help us much if the human still needs to spend a majority of their time reading code. We should do what we can to give us less code to read, without losing confidence in the changes that the LLM makes.