<p dir="auto">Babel is already an insanely powerful tool as is, but being able to input an AST would allow people using other AST utilities outside of Babel (e.g. UglifyJS2) or even languages that generate ESTree ASTs (like the experimental <a href="https://github.com/anko/eslisp">eslisp</a>) to plug in the output into Babel.</p>
<p dir="auto">As for prior art, UglifyJS2 accepts its own AST as well as the ESTree AST.</p>
<p dir="auto">I doubt it would be hard to do this, considering this would simply skip a step for the general algorithm (<del>parse</del>, transform, generate).</p>
<p dir="auto">I want to build ES6 by learning <a href="https://github.com/estree/estree">https://github.com/estree/estree</a> and <a href="https://github.com/jquery/esprima">https://github.com/jquery/esprima</a> and then generate ES5 code. Can I do this with babel?</p>