Support for Snowflake Cortex in Positron Assistant

[mikejcutt]

Hi there! Positron is fantastic, my team love using it - thanks for your great work. We're also excited to start using the assistant feature.

Our company uses Snowflake, and we therefore have access to Snowflake Cortex via the REST API, but AFAIA no major coding assistant extensions list Snowflake Cortex as a provider.

Using Snowflake Cortex over other model providers has strong data privacy benefits. It would be great if Positron could support SF Cortex in its new assistant feature, given Posit and Snowflake's strong ties. Thank you!!

[jthomasmock]

Hi @mikejcutt thanks for the kind words and interest! Would love to connect with your team and get additional feedback. Feel free to reach out via email -- I'm thomas @ posit.co

For our current integrations, we are primarily focused on Anthropic models (and providers who host Anthropic models). Support for tool-calling and models that have a high quality of code generated is necessary for success in our integration and testing.

Today, Positron Assistant means a direct connection to Anthropic's API; however, we are definitely planning on integrating Positron Assistant with other model providers.

Snowflake Cortex is one of the future targets, and we will be integrating with Snowflake via Positron on Posit Workbench, as we already have native managed credentials there for OAuth-based authentication, authorization and role switching: https://docs.posit.co/ide/server-pro/user/posit-workbench/managed-credentials/snowflake.html. Additionally, as you mentioned for privacy and security-posture, we have invested in a Snowflake Native App for customers that want to run Posit Workbench (including Positron and other IDEs like RStudio/JupyterLab) inside of Snowflake compute: https://posit.co/blog/multi-user-snowflake-native-posit-workbench/