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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'

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-and-agents 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/ https://docs.dbtcharts.com/charts/tables/

nzoschke 12d ago
Wow https://github.com/dbt-labs/dbt-charts 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 11d ago
>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 https://github.com/nyblnet/bento
- nzoschke 11d ago
  Thanks for sharing this too. It reminds me of GistDeck a super old project that turned a gist into slides. Infinitely better than powerpoint or GSlides. https://github.com/nzoschke/gistdeck https://github.com/nzoschke/gistdeck
pizzafeelsright 11d ago
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 11d ago
  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.
  - pizzafeelsright 11d ago
    I worked deep in big data briefly. Billions is too big for humans so we got creative how we visualized and filtered. AI slop has a "smell" meaning there's an abstracted data filter that results in rose or poop output. Shakespeare variable says the name doesn't matter.
    - cindyllm 11d ago
      [dead]
- mollifier14 11d ago
  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

nzoschke 12d ago

Wow https://github.com/dbt-labs/dbt-charts 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 11d ago

>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 https://github.com/nyblnet/bento

nzoschke 11d ago
Thanks for sharing this too. It reminds me of GistDeck a super old project that turned a gist into slides. Infinitely better than powerpoint or GSlides. https://github.com/nzoschke/gistdeck https://github.com/nzoschke/gistdeck

pizzafeelsright 11d ago

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 11d ago
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.
- pizzafeelsright 11d ago
  I worked deep in big data briefly. Billions is too big for humans so we got creative how we visualized and filtered. AI slop has a "smell" meaning there's an abstracted data filter that results in rose or poop output. Shakespeare variable says the name doesn't matter.
  - cindyllm 11d ago
    [dead]
mollifier14 11d ago
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