Interesting idea. But LLMs are trained on vast amount of "code as text" and tiny fraction of "code as AST"; wouldn't that significantly hurt the result quality?
Thanks and yeah that is a concern; however I have been getting quite good results from this AST approach, at least for building medium-complexity webapps. On the other hand though, this wasn't always true...the only OpenAI model that really works well is o3 series. Older models do write AST code but fail to do a good job because of the exact issue you mention, I suspect!
