Trevor Manz went from measuring plant apertures by hand in a wet lab to building the notebook that lets coding agents take the wheel. The creator of anywidget and founding engineer at marimo (marimo.io/pair) popped into The Test Set to spill on reactive notebooks, why marimo pair threw out every MCP tool but one, and what agents really want out of a data environment. This conversation also features a jacket bouncer, a hidden Python API, and Michael's slow-motion war with the word "marimo."

What's inside:

• Cell order doesn't matter in a reactive Python notebook
• Wet-lab pipettes and Harvard's visualization group, via Raspberry Pi
• The problem with building beautiful tools nobody actually uses
• The reason marimo pair deleted every agent tool but one
• Code mode: the hidden API humans aren't supposed to touch
• What happens when you ship the API your LLM hallucinated