I think the challenge with AST editing is discoverability. Like, I know what I want to select, I can see it there on the screen, but I don't know its name.
I've been dreaming of writing a plugin that surrounded the cursor in differently colored scopes. So instead of "next function" I'd be thinking "next blue" (blue being the color that functions are currently painted in).
In Ki you don't have to know the name of the syntax node, you can just press `d m`, and the editor will show the labels of all the syntax node visible that you can jump to.
Oh neat, I'm gonna give it a try!
I think there's still value in generic AST-level operations. Like expand selection and shrink selection. Or select around the current node vs select inside (whatever that means for the current node type).