My actual target goal at-the-moment is being able to export some of the existing notebooks I have on Observable to my offline-first file format, which led me to develop a programmable import so I can script grabbing other notebooks in a batch export. But after I got the programmable import working, I could not actually see the imported notebook. So that led me to add opening dependancies as extra panels in the golden layout. I was surprised when I first saw dependancies that they were actually executing, although its kinda obvious in retrospect coz of how Observable runtime works*. When I saw them running I then wanted to edit them, which I just added. Then, as a consequence of the editor being implemented in userspace, you can now live edit the development tooling itself! Kinda cool.

I still have not achieved my goal, but I am happy that these synergies are starting to emerge from combining userspace and development tooling inside a shared runtime.

* I have not chewed through the fully consequences of this, but it means you no longer need to plumb development aids all the way to the top like in Observable. For example, an LLM coding assistant can offer its advice without its UI spilling into the primary notebook.