Prerequisite and dependency mapping

Problem

Future extension capabilities (collaborative editing, advanced lineage visualization, real-time data exploration) will require foundational infrastructure that doesn't exist today: a language server protocol implementation for Dataface YAML, a streaming data transport for live preview updates, extension state persistence across sessions, or authentication flows for cloud-connected features. If these prerequisites are not mapped now, each future initiative will discover them independently and either build ad-hoc solutions or stall on unexpected infrastructure gaps. Mapping dependencies in advance reduces startup cost for future work and identifies opportunities to lay foundations incrementally during current development.

Context

• Future work on analyst authoring in VS Code/Cursor with preview, diagnostics, and assist will fail or stall if its hidden dependencies stay implicit, so this task should make the enabling conditions visible before anyone commits implementation effort.
• The goal is to understand which technical, product, operational, or partner-side prerequisites gate the most important next bets.
• Expected touchpoints include apps/ide/vscode-extension/, preview/inspector runtime code, and extension docs/tests, adjacent workstream plans, external dependencies, and any architectural decisions that would constrain later options.

Possible Solutions

• A - Let each future initiative discover its own blockers as it starts: workable short term, but it creates repeated surprise and thrash.
• B - Recommended: produce a dependency map for the most important future directions: identify technical enablers, ownership gaps, sequencing constraints, and external dependencies up front.
• C - Treat everything as blocked until all possible prerequisites are solved: safe on paper, but too broad to be useful.

Plan

1. List the future directions most likely to matter for analyst authoring in VS Code/Cursor with preview, diagnostics, and assist and enumerate the dependencies each one appears to require.
2. Group those dependencies into themes such as architecture, data/contracts, operations, design, or external approvals and identify likely owners.
3. Highlight the prerequisites that unlock multiple future paths and the ones that are too speculative to prioritize yet.
4. Turn the highest-value prerequisites into sequenced follow-up tasks or explicit decision points rather than leaving them buried in notes.

Implementation Progress

Review Feedback

• [ ] Review cleared