[TeMPOraL]

Of course it is. At a low level, AST is lines and boxes. So is a trace of control flow over time.

Code is downstream of thinking, which makes it downstream of lines and boxed.

[ninetyninenine]

The ast is just the result of a technique for parsing one style of programming involving text.

Visual programming with say boxes and lines at its core should not involve an ast.

You need to think outside the box. Your thinking of textual programming as the core and the visual programming as an abstraction above it which is how the industry has been focused since its inception.