I think spreadsheets were sort of an earlier version of this. You wanted to track some information, or make a plan, or just lay out some things, and this canvas of cells allowed you to put whatever structure _you_ needed in on the fly, adjust as you realized you needed something else.

It gave you the freedom and reduced the friction of iteration to figure out how you needed to organize things to discover what you wanted.

But it brought many limitations that surprisingly (to me at least) still persist today. I think AI has the ability to give you the same kind of freedom and friction reduction to allow you to build what you need.