Coding Agents: Moving From "Bash Mimics" to "AST Manipulators"

In the last post, we killed the "Tool Abstraction" layer. By replacing 50 brittle JSON-RPC wrappers with a single eeva process (Elixir on the BEAM).

Here is how we moved our agent from text-based hacking to actual AST-aware refactoring.

The Problem: The "Diff" Illusion

Standard agents "edit" files by outputting search blocks:

Plaintext