Me too (author of the post here). In fact, I was watching a seasoned data engineer at MotherDuck show me how they would attempt to debug a regex in a CTE. As a longtime SQL user, I felt the pain immediately; haven't we all been there before? Instant SQL followed from that.

Agree, definitely amazing feature. In the Python API you can get somewhere close with this kind of thing:

input_data = duckdb.sql("SELECT * FROM read_parquet('...')")

step_1 = duckdb.sql("SELECT ... FROM input_data JOIN ...")

step_2 = duckdb.sql("SELECT ... FROM step_1")

final = duckdb.sql("SELECT ... FROM step_2;")

In datagrip you can select part of a query and execute it to see its result.