Charts built for Chat

Dashboards created by AI are now as auditable and governable as those built with code.

dbt Labs has open-sourced dbt Charts, a declarative language for building dashboards, aiming to bring governance to AI-generated reports. Traditionally, AI-generated dashboards result in fragmented codebases (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, chart libraries, React/Streamlit apps), making them difficult to trace and audit. Business intelligence (BI) tools have integrated AI copilots into their UI-first applications, which restricts the AI's capabilities to what the UI exposes. dbt Charts offers a third option by placing dashboards directly into code, using a structured YAML format that defines interactive dashboards in a single, auditable file. This approach allows agents to create code with the freedom of programming while maintaining readability and auditability. The dbt Charts language supports SQL for data declaration and YAML for visualization, incorporating Markdown for prose and Jinja for variables and macros.

The launch of dbt Charts signifies a critical step in the "unbundling" of traditional BI platforms, moving the visualization layer from proprietary UIs into an open-source, code-based standard. This language-first approach prioritizes the needs of AI agents, which are more adept at working with code than graphical interfaces, aligning with the trend of AI becoming the primary interface for data interaction. By embedding dashboard definitions in auditable YAML files alongside dbt projects, it enables unified version control and CI/CD pipelines for both data transformations and their corresponding visualizations, reducing the risk of production errors.

This move has implications for how analytics infrastructure will evolve, potentially decoupling the presentation layer from monolithic BI vendors and fostering a more modular, code-centric data stack. The open-source nature of dbt Charts aims to establish it as a new standard, allowing for greater flexibility and interoperability compared to the closed ecosystems of existing BI tools. The accompanying dbtCharts.com platform provides a hosted solution for the remaining BI components like hosting and access control, offering a comprehensive, albeit complementary, offering to the open-source language.