The idea is to put the wiring between components (holes/pads) into the board and enable/disable connecting it somehow. The idea is trivial and I'm not the first to make something like this, but no one seems to sell boards like this.
Currently, the protoboard landscape looks like this:
Some notable recent developments on prototype boards:
I think both of these are great, but also complicated because the wiring is not straightforward. It left me thinking that it would be easier to just assume a single (or double) layer board with direct connections to neighbors. If the hole isn't used, it still passes on the signal. Thus, a line of holes connecting components is the same as a wire. It's just standard planar circuit layout on a grid.
There are 2 useful ways to do this:
These fix the need for any wiring while allowing easy to follow traces with arbitrary layouts. For the connected one, the traces are easy to cut.