That’s what I thought when I saw this: smithy without the need to bring Gradle into your project

You don’t have to use Gradle with Smithy. You can also use the self-contained CLI which doesn’t use Gradle: https://smithy.io/2.0/guides/smithy-cli/index.html

This gives me an excuse to revisit smithy. Curious if editor support is still poor in VSCode. Last time I cracked it open, I found that (1) there was no AST introspection and (2) existing language support tooling was lacking modern features (click to definition, autocomplete of ambient/imported smithy types). (2) made me attempt to write a language server and I stopped when I realized there was no easy way to hook into the parser.