When it comes to SWEs doing ML, our goal to bring together a bunch of apps that get people most of the way to something they can bring into production.
I appreciate your skepticism of online IDEs, and it’s unlikely we’ll ever completely replace notebooks or whatever IDEs people prefer hacking on locally. Instead, we’d like to take a hybrid approach, in which our online IDE is sufficient for making minor tweaks to a model after its in production, but the brunt of development can still happen locally, in which changes would be pushed to Git and synced with our online IDE.
It’s true that SWEs can deploy their own APIs, but that feels like an unnecessary annoyance to take for granted. At a high level you’re just setting up an API, but really you’re also going to setup some versioning system and a Docker file and monitoring, and all of that adds up to a lot of cognitive overhead.
BTW - the Jupyter-like cell execution can be turned on by clicking the “Interactive Mode” button on the bottom right corner of the IDE.