Introduction
Visual Studio Code Notebooks (VS Code Notebooks) offer a lightweight, extensible, and powerful interface for developing and debugging code in notebook-style cells—combining the interactivity of Jupyter notebooks with the modularity and tooling of a modern IDE. VS Code Notebooks support rich, multi-language workflows that span exploratory data analysis, LLM experimentation, infrastructure scripting, and machine learning model development.They serve as a key productivity layer for engineers, analysts, and researchers working across cloud, data, and AI systems.
Key benefits of using VS Code Notebooks include:
Interactive Cell-Based Development: Run code in isolated cells with immediate feedback—ideal for data exploration, model prototyping, and LLM prompt iteration.
Multi-Kernel Support: Run notebooks using Python, SQL, R, Bash, or custom kernels—making it easy to integrate data workflows with system and orchestration logic.
Full IDE Capabilities: Leverage VS Code’s powerful editing features—linting, IntelliSense, Git integration, debugger, extensions—directly within notebook workflows.
Seamless Version Control: Treat notebooks as text-based .ipynb or .py files that integrate smoothly with Git—enabling code reviews, diffing, and CI testing.
Extensible with Plugins: Supports integration with environments like Conda, Docker, and virtual environments, as well as plugins for Jupyter, Copilot, and LLM-based assistants.
VS Code Notebooks are used to explore datasets, validate transformations, test prompt variants, prototype agents, analyze experiment results, and orchestrate ML evaluation tasks. They offer a lightweight alternative to hosted notebooks, giving teams offline reproducibility, local dev speed, and tight integration with source code and data systems. By adopting Visual Studio Code Notebooks, you can enable its teams to develop interactively, iterate quickly, and ship production-ready code—all within a unified, developer-friendly interface.