Future opportunity research

Problem

The extension roadmap beyond v1.2 is blank. There is no structured inventory of long-horizon opportunities — collaborative editing, real-time dashboard sharing, embedded analytics previews, deeper dbt lineage visualization, or native notebook-style exploration — evaluated for user impact and strategic fit. Without this forward-looking research, the team will either chase whatever idea is newest or stall after the v1.2 release with no clear next step. Capturing and evaluating future opportunities now, while usage data and partner feedback are fresh, ensures the roadmap reflects genuine user needs rather than speculative feature lists.

Context

• There are plausible future bets for analyst authoring in VS Code/Cursor with preview, diagnostics, and assist, but they should be captured as concrete opportunities with user value and strategic fit rather than as loose brainstorming.
• This task should separate genuinely promising directions from attractive-but-vague ideas and tie each candidate to the product or platform outcomes it could improve.
• Expected touchpoints include apps/ide/vscode-extension/, preview/inspector runtime code, and extension docs/tests, roadmap notes, adjacent workstream dependencies, and any evidence from users that points toward a longer-horizon opportunity.

Possible Solutions

• A - Keep future ideas as an unstructured backlog list: easy to collect, but hard to prioritize or revisit intelligently.
• B - Recommended: turn future ideas into structured opportunity notes: describe user value, strategic rationale, dependencies, and why each idea is worth considering later.
• C - Skip future opportunity work until all near-term milestones are complete: lowers distraction, but loses useful strategic context.

Plan

1. Gather the strongest future ideas for analyst authoring in VS Code/Cursor with preview, diagnostics, and assist from roadmap discussions, usage feedback, and adjacent workstream needs.
2. Write a structured note for each opportunity covering user value, likely scope, dependencies, and the signals that would justify investment.
3. Rank the opportunities relative to each other and explicitly note which ones are interesting but not yet credible.
4. Link the top opportunities to prerequisite or experiment tasks so they can mature without being mistaken for near-term commitments.

Implementation Progress

Review Feedback

• [ ] Review cleared