Data scientists leave VS Code to inspect scientific variables
Scientific Python developers say VS Code’s variable explorer is too limited or slow for inspecting matrices and tabular data, and some choose Spyder instead for data-science work. A focused extension could improve that workflow, though the strongest evidence is from 2020–2021 and should be revalidated against current VS Code features. One signal about filtering and visualizing recorded variable history is adjacent, but describes a different debugging workflow.
For python data scientists and scientific-computing developers. Mentioned from Aug 2020 to Mar 2025 on GitHub and Hacker News.
4 different people described this problem in 2 separate discussions.
- Indie fit
- 5.0/10
- Pain
- 6.0/10
- Frequency
- 5.8/10
- Willingness to pay
- 0.0/10
- Momentum
- 5.0/10
- Who pays
- Professionals
- Competition
- High
- Build difficulty
- Medium
What people said
Quoted word for word. Follow a link to read the whole discussion.
The current VS Code one has too limited capabilities and also is far too slow to be useful
The one reason I use spyder (if I'm using Python) or use R studio (if I'm using R) instead of VS Code for scientific computing, data science, or image processing
Build brief
See what to build and who will buy it
- 1 product idea with the smallest useful version and pricing
- 4 places to find your first customers
- 2 more quotes from people who have this problem
- Current workarounds, existing solutions and risks