28 points thingsilearned 1 hour ago 8 comments

thingsilearned 1 hour 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.

fletchrichman 1 hour ago | parent

This looks great can’t wait to try it out

marojejian 1 hour ago | parent

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

mollifier14 58 minutes 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 45 minutes ago | parent

Yup, that's exactly the idea.

nzoschke 11 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.

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/

xnx 1 minute ago | parent

Is this associated with dbtlabs?

ramesh31 1 minute 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, and all of this will be for naught.