@jashkenas I don’t think I want an API (can’t believe I just typed that).
My primary use-case is publishing a notebook or a subset of cells in a designed format to a website or application. I am using the Runtime to run cells reactively (notebook distiller tho 
). No trouble pulling down the notebook or using the Runtime. But iteration from there was tedius; it felt like write once.
Secondary use-case is as an author (this is aesthetic, but maybe helps with the above). Lack of annotated history has tripped me up a couple times in Observable itself. The web UI is beautiful, and incredibly powerful for getting oriented in a new problem. But after orientation, in telling that problem’s story (or in particular stories) I want to refactor, extract things, share functionality. This feels more awkward and a lot more fragile than the honeymoon I just had with the problem when it was new.
Conceptually I’m looking to move seamlessly between a notebook and local code, which I can refactor into from the notebook. The ideas from the VS plugin are compelling (API Request - #4 by bgchen). I think any local notebook environment would get me a lot closer. Browser livereload & the runtime sounds complicated. Admittedly, this isn’t very concrete — I’m not even sure what text I would be editing, and with what.
I’ll be tinkering with it irregardless, but really appreciate your thoughts!