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  • This looks really slick! I was building something similar, so visuals are re-useable artifacts that external services know how to render, where we ask agents in whatever the interface is, slack, team's other agentic harnesses etc. and the agents receive the spec from the service, in this case dbt charts. if there was a unified spec that was agreed upon these third-party harnesses and apps would all speak the same charting language which would be super cool. I haven't read through it in detail but how does this differ from something like https://github.com/vega/vega-lite
    by engrav3er40
  • Hi there, Burak here, creator of DaC and Bruin: https://github.com/bruin-data/dac

    This is obviously a space we are very much interested in, so it is definitely nice to see approaches that attack the same problem. I haven't played with dbtcharts in depth yet but it looks very similar to DaC in principle, and also in the actual spec. I believe the industry definitely needs solutions like this to help get out of the legacy BI tools as Bİ is one of the biggest bottlenecks for AI adoption in large orgs.

    Excited to see further competition in the space, nice launch!

    by karakanb
  • very cool! i'd been thinking about this idea and found vega-lite to be an interesting take as well [0].

    i'll compare and look at folding this into setoku for app generation [1]. right now apps are just html blobs your claude authors + a mechanism for populating them with live data. definitely hard to audit but very flexible for operators to claude together internal apps. anyway, the charts look decent but really depend on the model that's making them and don't really follow any sort of style guide (example: https://demo.setoku.com/apps/a7a1240ae0bc202c5eefa1cc). Your lib could bring some consistency and make global styling possible.

    [0]: https://vega.github.io/vega-lite/

    [1]: https://setoku.com

    by rgbrgb
  • It's neat but pretends to be more innovative than it actually is. BI has already been decoupled from everything else. People use AI to generate Excel and Power BI reports. YAML/XML/JSON - that doesn't matter. AI can generate whatever you instruct it to do.

    So yes, a nice and logical development of dbt, but hardly as innovative as the blog post wants to sound. Nevertheless, I think it's a good idea that will be popular in certain circles. Hiring a professional data designer is a good idea - data visualization is very easy to get wrong.

    by dgudkov
  • Interesting, but I'm not sure how it's different from Observable Framework ( https://observablehq.github.io/framework/ ) for dashboards as code. I like that one because it's Markdown and JS instead of a language defined in YAML + templates
    by bbkane
  • Malloy is an alternative to dbt, they have a similar product called Malloyyo [1], and Publisher [3], you can also the chat with HN data demo they have [4].

    DBTCharts says you can serve charts locally, but it seems they want you to use their hosting service in production. Whereas, Malloyyo / Publisher are free to use anywhere. If you like college football checkout how I visualize drive data in [2], made with Malloyyo.

    [1] - https://github.com/malloydata/malloyyo [2] - https://mrtimo.github.io/cfb-games/games-2026.html?%24SEASON... [3] - https://github.com/malloydata/publisher [4] - https://community.credibledata.com/hackernews

    by mrtimo
  • This looks great.

    "Unbundling BI" is absolutely where things are headed now that more people have agents, coding agents, agent computers to help with work.

    I'm seeing this all up and down knowledge work tools. I've started treating email as a BI problem -- ETL it from Gmail and and create many different views into it and reports from it.

    I just wrote up some thoughts on that here: https://housecat.com/blog/making-gmail-data-fast-for-humans-...

    A natural followup is how to better visualize this data in chat. The DBT table component looks like it could help https://docs.dbtcharts.com/charts/tables/

    by nzoschke
  • Hi HN, I'm Dave the founder of Chartio (YC'10 now Atlassian Analytics), announcing today dbt Charts, an open source YAML dialect and tool for declaring and rendering dashboards.

    When making dashboards with claude or other agents, a lot of free-form artifacts are created that makes it hard to audit and scale. dbt Charts is a simple YAML dialect that declares and renders a chart (think markdown but for dashboards). Along with dbt its Apache 2.0 and launched today.

    We hope this language + AI help make the BI space more open with dashboards as concise auditable code. Would love any thoughts and feedback.

    by thingsilearned

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