Iterative, the MLOps company, has announced a free extension to Visual Studio Code (VS Code), a source-code editor made by Microsoft, for experiment tracking and machine learning model development. VS Code is a coding editor that helps users to start coding quickly in any programming language. The DVC Extension for Visual Studio Code allows users of all technical backgrounds to create, compare, visualize, and reproduce machine learning experiments.

Through Git and Iterative’s DVC, the extension makes experiments easily reproducible, unlike traditional experiment tracking tools that just stream metrics.

The extension complements the existing VS Code UX with features using the Command Palette, Source Control view, File Tree explorer, and even custom in-editor webviews, to aid data scientists in their model development and experimentation workflows. Users can pull and push versioned data, run and reproduce experiments, and view tables and metrics.

The VS Code extension offers data scientists the ability to view, run, and instantly reproduce experiments with parameters, metrics, and plots all in a single place, as well as manage and version data sets and models. The extension also provides resource tracking so that data scientists can see which data sets and models have changed and allows exploration of all files of a project or model.

Other features include live tracking to see how metrics change in real-time, cloud-agnostic data versioning and management, and native plot visualization.

By Emily Nicholls