dbt Labs open-sources dbt Charts, moving dashboards into agent-friendly YAML

dbt Labs has open-sourced dbt Charts, a declarative YAML language for building interactive dashboards, and launched a hosted platform, dbtCharts.com, in public beta. The pitch is a middle path between two bad options for AI-driven analytics: letting an agent spew a tangle of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and framework code that is slow and expensive to audit, or bolting a copilot onto a UI-first BI tool that can only do what the interface exposes. dbt Charts instead declares an entire board in a single readable file, using SQL for what data to show, YAML for how to show it, plus Markdown for prose and Jinja for variables and macros. A CLI renders boards to SVG, HTML, PNG, PDF, or the terminal, and can serve a folder of them as a site.

The framing borrows from dbt founder Tristan Handy’s argument that BI is undergoing a second unbundling: the modern data stack already pulled compute, ingestion, and transformation out of monolithic BI tools, and now charts are leaving too. The reasoning is that dashboards are increasingly built by chat agents rather than people clicking through UIs, and agents are fluent in code, SQL, and Git but clumsy in someone else’s interface. The language claims over 1,100 config options across sixteen chart types, with cascading themes and board inheritance to keep files short, and a designer was brought in to make the output look less like a generic dashboard grid.

The deeper play is integration with dbt itself: a charts/ directory lives beside models/ in the same repo, queries resolve through ref() against the dbt manifest, and validation catches a renamed model or missing column in CI before it hits production. That tight feedback loop, including visualization linting that flags overcrowded charts, is aimed squarely at giving agents guardrails. The language ships under Apache 2.0 and runs locally without an account, while the hosted platform layers on warehouse connections, access control, version history, and permissioned conversational analytics. dbt Charts is pre-1.0, so the grammar is still expected to change.