Adoption hardening for internal teams

Problem

The extension was hardened for a single pilot team (FT Analytics) with a known dbt project structure and a small set of dashboard patterns. As additional internal teams and early design partners begin using it, they bring different project layouts, database adapters, YAML conventions, and scale characteristics that expose new failure modes. Preview rendering may break on unfamiliar chart configurations, diagnostics may produce false positives against non-standard YAML structures, and onboarding friction increases because the setup process assumes FT Analytics conventions. Without hardening for this broader set of environments, adoption stalls at the first team boundary.

Context

• Pilot work proved the baseline flow for analyst authoring in VS Code/Cursor with preview, diagnostics, and assist, but repeated use by multiple internal teams and first design partners will surface reliability and UX edge cases that the pilot could work around manually.
• This milestone is about turning a promising path into something teams can use predictably without bespoke engineering help, support heroics, or undocumented workarounds.
• Expected touchpoints include apps/ide/vscode-extension/, preview/inspector runtime code, and extension docs/tests, plus any onboarding, validation, and issue-triage surfaces that repeatedly fail during broader adoption.

Possible Solutions

• A - Fix only the currently visible blockers: fast, but it tends to preserve hidden fragility and leaves the next round of adopters to rediscover the same classes of issues.
• B - Recommended: define an adoption-hardening checklist and close the highest-impact gaps: combine real usage review, targeted fixes, docs/runbook updates, and validation so repeated use becomes predictable.
• C - Pause broader adoption until a larger redesign is finished: reduces short-term support load, but delays the real feedback this milestone is meant to capture.

Plan

1. Review prototype/pilot outputs, open issues, and support friction to identify the top blockers to repeated team adoption of analyst authoring in VS Code/Cursor with preview, diagnostics, and assist.
2. Turn those findings into a prioritized hardening scope that covers product behavior, docs/runbooks, and validation for the highest-risk flows.
3. Land or queue the highest-impact fixes and document explicit known limits for anything intentionally left out of scope.
4. Re-run representative multi-team or design-partner scenarios and update follow-up tasks based on what still fails or feels too brittle.

Implementation Progress

Review Feedback

• [ ] Review cleared