Wait what? Do you know about the %debug magic? It is the best thing ever, particularly when prototyping in the notebook which keeps most of the state.

I saw Fernando Pérez use it in a YouTube video. Shame I cannot find it anymore. He was saying he debugs his code only by placing 1/0 in the part of the code he wants to inspect. After the exception is thrown %debug allows you to step into the stack and explore it via a repl. I found that crazy and tried it it. It is life changing. That's how I debug my python code for years now.

Pdb works fine in notebooks though, and that's one of the numerous reasons students should learn it first, before any GUI debugger.