Yet another Hacker News

64 points thingsilearned 2 hours ago 20 comments

thingsilearned 2 hours ago | parent

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.

mceoin 28 minutes ago | parent

Congrats on the launch Dave! I was wondering who was going to launch an attempt at industry standard here. Hope it gains widespread adoption.

fletchrichman 2 hours ago | parent

This looks great can’t wait to try it out

marojejian 2 hours ago | parent

Nice to see something built for AI that's supporting both openness and interpretablilty.

mollifier14 2 hours ago | parent

A beacon of hope between all the vibe coded JS slop charts and dashboards! I love that this creates artifacts that are readable, maintainable and reproduce the same dashboard consistently (deterministically!), just with fresh data.

thingsilearned 1 hour ago | parent

Yup, that's exactly the idea.

nzoschke 1 hour ago | parent

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/

nzoschke 1 hour ago | parent

Wow https://github.com/dbt-labs/dbt-charts has a great chat user / agent coding experience:

> Make charts of this with dbt Charts. Start with: uv tool install dbt-charts && dct skills intro

> build a dashboard of my hiring inboxes: list of candidate name / email / locale, application quality, response age

The one-shot dashboard is surprisingly good.

stackghost 55 minutes ago | parent

>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.

Agreed. Coupled with bento[0] for slide decks, I think this type of project is a very welcome development, helping us move away from walled gardens and proprietary software suites.

[0] https://github.com/nyblnet/bento

pizzafeelsright 47 minutes ago | parent

Why visualize data? Graphs and charts always felt like the "show your work" in math class. It is forced synesthesia.

The rocket either lands or doesn't, safely, as expected. Green and Red lights are abstracted data plots.

The context should be the focus.

"Rocket must land at less than 0.2/mps" and pump the data into that context filter, more - reduce velocity, less - green light.

thingsilearned 41 minutes ago | parent

I've worked in data for 15 years and I've never heard this argument. I love it :)!

Who knows, with AI this may be the future. Visualizations were created to help us understand data. Florence Nightingale published them "to affect thro' the Eyes what we fail to convey to the public through their word-proof ears."

Often a formula better represents a situation. But I'm not sure how much impact they'd have in spreading that understanding outside of a formula-minded audience.

mollifier14 34 minutes ago | parent

Sure, machines don't need visualization (although it seems that images are a surprisingly good medium to get context into agents), but humans still do. Mathematicians have plotted functions for a long time now. While the pure truth lies in the definition of f(x), the visualization helps the mind to grasp what it actually is. Humans will run companies for the foreseeable future, and so we will need visualization for the foreseeable future

xnx 1 hour ago | parent

Is this associated with dbtlabs?

georgewfraser 1 hour ago | parent

Yes this is a dbt product - will be in the dbt cli soon, we shipped it initially as a separate tool while it’s in preview.

ramesh31 1 hour ago | parent

Everyone wants to come up with a clever One Spec to Rule Them All for generative UI. My bet is that the bitter lesson still bites. Models will continue getting faster and more error free at single-shot writing things from scratch with primitive libraries, and the flexibility that allows will make all of this for naught.

thingsilearned 51 minutes ago | parent

So this is a fairly domain specific (dashboards) spec and we intentionally avoid getting too generic.

The raw HTML/SVG or base libraries approach may well win out, but it does make it quite hard or impossible for humans to follow along and verify for instance where the numbers on a chart came from.

I think in a future where AI's doing all that verifying (or we just trust it), the AI might still prefer to use a DSL like ours because the abstraction maintains consistency, lowers maintenance, and saves a lot of tokens.

But the most helpful bits of a structured DSL are for sure still for humans. The structured format ensures things are readable and testable. Ours also enables a generative UI, which for now at least is still a much faster way to make visual edits while working with an AI, vs always through it.

mollifier14 44 minutes ago | parent

I think we're still ways out until companies will blindly trust AI that the data they pulled is correct. If a data team member sees a dashboard or chart, their first questions is "Is the SQL below this chart correct?". The easier it is to see the SQL that pulled the data, the better.

mirelahmd 49 minutes ago | parent

thats intresting

dgudkov 11 minutes ago | parent

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.

engrav3er40 7 minutes ago | parent

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