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Comment by mritchie712 | Hacker News Reader

> Teams need notebooks that are reactive, collaborative, and AI‑ready

reactive: this matters, but all the alternatives have it

collaborative: this matters very little in the Figma / Google Docs sense of collaborative in practice. It's very rare you want two people working on the same notebook at the same time. What you really want is git style version control.

AI‑ready: you want something as close to plain python (which is already as AI-ready as it gets) as possible.

if you're measuring across these dimensions, I'd go with marimo.

marimo is saved as plain .py files, easy to version control and has a reactive model.

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I'd argue the opposite.

There is plenty of AI extensions, but the experience matters. The depth of integration matters. When you execute queries against production warehouses and you make decisions based on the results of AI-generated code, accuracy matters. We had our first demo of an AI agent running in 2 days, it took us another 2 years to build the infrastructure to test it, monitor it, and integrate it into the existing data source.

You'd be surprised how many people collaborate together. Software engineering is solitary, collaboration happens in GitHub. But data analysis is collaborative. We frequently have 300+ people looking at the same notebook at the same time.

.py never worked for data exploration. You need to mix code, text, charts, interactive elements. And then you need to add metadata: comments, references to integrations, auth secrets. There are notebooks that are several pages long with 0 code. We are building a computational medium of the future and that goes beyond a plaintext file, no matter how much we love the simplicity of a plaintext file.

seems you completely missed the point. marimo does everything you're looking for in plain .py files that render as notebooks.

https://marimo.io/blog/python-not-json

We seriously considered this, but decided against this. While elegant for demo projects, it doesn't scale for serious deployments. You still need to deal with secrets, metadata (lots of it), backwards-compatibility, and extensibility (we have 23 block types today, many more to come).

This is the first time I'm hearing about marimo and i have to say their landing page is excellent! Immediately makes me want to try it

I don’t even know what AI ready means. You can press tab to autocomplete? Databricks has that and it’s extremely annoying. Google Colab is slightly better.

But sending my code over the wire to an LLM along with a prompt that says “please don’t write any bugs” is not a new feature.

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