This looks very promising:
* auto completion!
* integrated documentation!
* exporting Ansible YAML!
I didn't yet have change to play with this, so I just note the ways I see Jupyter can be good fit for Ansible. You can try each step and see it working before moving to next one. There doesn't seem to be support yet for richer results view nor Jupyter Widgets, but imagine looking at actual error messages and result views instead of JSON as text. Getting and setting parameters for playbooks could be done using external data sources instead of hand-crafting inventories and config files. You could use same approach as Ara [1] and trace execution of tasks.
I assume you can run Ansible kernel from JupyterLab instance, so you can do file management and use terminal right on the machine you're running Ansible commands. Also, I'd imagine connecting with Jupyter Console (formerly IPython) to same kernel state as notebook is running with is possible here as well. This provides Terminal goodness alongside browser's visuals.
[1] Ara: http://ara.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
https://mybinder.org/v2/gh/ansible/ansible-jupyter-kernel/ma...
Could you perhaps elaborate how the kernel directs Ansible?
Also, is there any difference between local and remote Ansible runs?
edit: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/cli/ansible-console.... "REPL console for executing Ansible tasks."
It is not just litterate programming, but more like an IDE that does not require your code to keep working (CI/CD... ) : you can refactor at your own pace, iterate, introspect past results, etc.
You prototype like crazy, iterate much faster, and can tweak much more.
However, notebooks are not popular with many programmers. They stick to IDEs. Their loss.
