Thank you for the kind words and for being a part of the CUE community!
You've perfectly captured the vision: "elevated... sane user experience and engineering driven principles" is exactly what we're building the Configuration Control Plane to provide, building on the capabilities of open source CUE.
We completely agree that "YAML and friends will stay." That's a core design principle of CUE: its ability to easily consume existing formats and export back to them, so upstream and downstream tools and workflows don't need to change.
As others have kindly pointed out, we use authentication as one means of preventing abuse of the system. Each guide is connected to a remote container instance, so there are real compute costs associated with each user's session. Leaving this open is not something that we, as a sponsor-supported open source project, can afford.
Tour of Go is an introduction to the Go language. Play with Go is not intended as a replacement for that, rather it's an interactive introduction to the tooling required to program in Go. The go command is the most obvious example of that, but modules also lend themselves well to this sort of guide.
You've perfectly captured the vision: "elevated... sane user experience and engineering driven principles" is exactly what we're building the Configuration Control Plane to provide, building on the capabilities of open source CUE.
We completely agree that "YAML and friends will stay." That's a core design principle of CUE: its ability to easily consume existing formats and export back to them, so upstream and downstream tools and workflows don't need to change.
Thanks again for the great comment!