Reading the article, I don't think it has AI. They've just made the tools in a way that AI assistants can also use them, and so fix linting errors without anyone needing to fine-tune the LLM on the syntax.

That's actually pretty slick. I've been wondering how we could avoid blocking innovation in programming languages because of the death cycle of "no training data on language -> LLM can't learn language -> Assistant can't code language -> nobody uses language -> no training data on language".

Yeah, reading the docs it seems you are right. The landing page mentions AI-native at the very top and all over the place, so I got the wrong impression that it's somehow tightly coupled to an AI integration. But looks like it's optional.

> But I really don't want to deal with yet another AI assistant, especially not a custom one when I'm already using Claude/etc from the CLI and I want those agents to help me edit the notebooks.

So funny story- you can use exactly the same CLI tools in your notebook. Zed built out the ACP spec [1] which lets Claude Code go anywhere that implements it (as of Oct 2nd; emacs, vim, zed and marimo [2])

[1]: https://github.com/agentclientprotocol/agent-client-protocol

[2]: https://zed.dev/blog/acp-progress-report

I hate how much I lean into VSCode, but the Python interactive mode gets you a really good live coding environment. Instead of Jupyter cells, you have a regular .py file with chunks of code prefixed with a `# %%`. VSCode gives you a similar experience to a notebook, with the same controls (Run Above Cells, Restart and Run All, etc). So something like

  # %%
  import polars as pl

  # %%
  df = pl.DataFrame()
  df.shape

  # %%
  def foobar():
    return 1

Since it is a regular .py file all of your existing tooling will work with it. The one thing you lose vs a Jupyter notebook is saved output. I mostly use these .py files, but have a few .ipynb notebook files for when I want to commit the output from some important task.

You can not use the AI features, nothing is enabled by default (you have to bring your own keys)