dbt Charts open-sources dashboards as YAML so AI agents can build governed reports
Charts built for Chat
dbt Labs has open-sourced dbt Charts, a declarative YAML language that turns dashboards into auditable code. It wraps SQL, Markdown, and Jinja into a single file that renders to SVG, HTML, PNG, PDF, or terminal, with over 1,100 config options and sixteen chart types. Built for chat agents, it offers strict validation and deep dbt integration. A hosted beta adds conversational analytics, visual editing, and permissions.
So today you choose between the messy freedom of code and the narrow control of a BI tool. We built a third option.
- nzoschke
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/
- zahlman
Let's say (because it's true) I've been programming for close to 40 years but in completely different domains, such that the concept of "dashboard" means almost nothing to me. Could someone explain what this project actually is, or what "BI" is or why I would want it? I mean, I assume that "BI" is the thing that "PowerBI" implements, but other than that I couldn't tell you anything.
- thingsilearned
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.
- dgudkov
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.
- bbkane
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