[afhammad]

> almost a WebUI alternative to a REPL

That's basically how my team have been increasingly using it. Simply connect Livebook to a locally running Phoenix project and you have a Livebook REPL into your server. When you're dealing with complex data, pulling from different sources and have to build up a bunch of context before you iterate on a function it's super useful to be able to break up that code into chunks, take form inputs[0] along the way and document any quirks. We keep a bunch of livebooks committed in the repo to help debug and iterate on the more complex parts of our codebase.

0: https://hexdocs.pm/kino/Kino.html

[thomasfortes]

A couple weeks ago a client asked for some stats that came out of the blue (the data was collected, but they weren't exposed at the dashboard), his app was at fly.io, I've set up a wireguard tunnel to connect a livebook to the app and we went in a couple hours exploration of all the data that wasn't exposed at the dashboard, I took a ton of notes and the client spent a lot of time gushing about how he never had that much access to the underlying data in projects before without having to wait at least a couple weeks, to be able to work with live data almost instantaneously is a plus that I don't know if I'm able to give up at this point.

It was a new client and a short project but since then they closed a couple years contract to a new project, Livebook is indeed magic.