Notebook development outside of Fabric portal

I have been working all day trying to develop a notebook outside of the Fabric portal and it is one problem after another. I have VS code and the Fabric Data Engineering extension installed. I want to develop outside the portal for a number of reasons. Most specifically i want to use Claude Code to help me out (not because I don't know how to code but because it is way faster at it), and I need to development in mass. Claude will develop a number of notebooks automatically but cannot do that in the extension.

I am really struggling. The Extension in VS code is nearly unusable.

1. You really need to start the notebook on the portal because there is not any way that I have found to attach a default lakehouse or define a parameters cell except in the portal.

2. When using a any AI assistance it cannot update the code on the screen. It does it in the background and you have to close the file without saving and reopen to see the change.

3. I have only successfully synchronized changes back to Fabric once or twice. If I do any substantial amount of changes in Code when I try to synchronize back I get errors.

4. The extension is really only set up to work on one notebook at a time.

In addition what is a good strategy for source control? set up a repo for the extension's local folder? Attach the workspace to a repo?

This area really needs to get significantly better fast. Have others had these problems? Has anyone solved these issues?