Blog · September 14, 2026 · Dave Fowler

We’re open sourcing dbt Charts , a declarative language for dashboards, so that even the dashboards you build by chatting with an agent can be governed.

AI for data is here, and the long-promised self-serve analytics is finally happening. Anyone with a data connection can chat a report into existence in an afternoon, and the first results are impressive.

The frictions show up fast, though. By default an agent turns one simple report into a pile of files: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, a couple of chart libraries, and a React or Streamlit app once it has to be live. Tracing a result back to its source means following it through several languages and files, which is slow for people to audit and costs the agent time and tokens on every change.

BI tools went the other way and bolted copilots onto their UI-first apps.…