We use DuckDB internally because we like its ergonomics - it's flexible, runs well in memory, manages a lot of file structures under the hood, but we do work with Snowflake (and Databricks and other warehouses) as well.

Today, we’re launching dashboards that you and your agents can work on together. You can connect your coding agent or AI chat to BitBoard and build live reporting. Here’s a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPl0K565a7c.

AI tools treat data analysis as ephemeral, making it hard to report or collaborate. Legacy BI tools weren’t intended for AI users, so they bolt on chatbots and can’t offer meaningful control to your agents. Software can now make far more of a business legible than BI ever could, but neither legacy BI nor chat bots are built to handle it.

Our original product was AI agents for administrative tasks in healthcare (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44237769), but customers kept pulling us toward their data analysis problems: queries scattered across disparate sources, spreadsheets floating everywhere. We kept building tooling for addressing that, and at a certain point those tools were becoming our product.

We ran into several problems. Agents made bad inferences because they had no context on the business. They couldn't be trusted to make decisions because nothing checked their work. And anything one agent or one person figured out was invisible to everyone else. In BitBoard, humans and agents interact with the same data primitives but get tools designed for their own work.

We’re building dashboards to make the human reading experience better. These dashboards progressively use intelligence - starting from code or SQL queries and leading to full embedded apps. Humans and agents will need to agree on methods to interpret data, so we’re letting both contribute to canonical sources, entities, and measures (using your favorite semantic model or ours). Every answer comes with provenance, and the same call with the same parameters returns the same number.

Looking ahead, these shared primitives let long-running agents operate inside a business, and we're building those agents too. An agent needs a measurable goal and a way to verify its work. BitBoard gives it both. The agent takes a problem like a metric drifting or a funnel leaking and figures out what to do next. Its work becomes datasets, dashboards, and traces that the team can observe and sign off on.

Technically, we’re building a collaboration engine with isomorphic updates for humans and AI, columnar analysis (we use DuckDB and Apache Arrow), grounding and verification infrastructure, and enabling long running tasks with agent containers and traces. For agentic work we’re big fans of applying LLM judgement to discover problems, and then generating deterministic software to automate them.

Try it out at https://app.bitboard.work. (We require an email so we can set up your account).

We’re excited about how data analysis and science can change in the age of LLMs, and welcome all your thoughts!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48506545

Points: 55

# Comments: 24

Another is that once you free up clinician time, they will quickly find higher-leverage tasks. It shows how overloaded the system is, and that there's pent-up demand to make it better.

We're evaluating Cua (https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/cua) to containerize our agents; am a fan so far. We're also putting Computer Use agents from (OAI and Anthropic) to the test. Many legacy ERPs don't run in the browser and we have to meet them there. I think we're a few months away from things working reliably and efficiently.

We're evaluating several of the top models (both open and closed) for browser navigation (claude's winning atm) and PDF extraction. Since we're performing repetitive tasks, the goal is make our workflows RL-able. Being able to rely on OSS models will help a lot here.

We're building our own data sets and evaluations for many of the subtasks. We're using openai's evals (https://github.com/openai/evals) as a framework to guide our own tooling.

Apart from that, we write in Typescript, Python, and Golang. We use Postgres for persistence (nothing fancy here). We host on AWS, and might go on premises for some customers. We plan on investing a lot into our workflow system as the backbone of our product.

I prefer open source when possible. Everything's new and early, and many things require source changes that others might not be able to prioritize.

Edit - one thing I'd love to find a good solution for is reliably extracting handwriting from PDF documents. Clinicians have to do this a ton to keep the trains running on time, and being able to digitize that knowledge on the go will be huge.

Very open to ideas here. We're seeing great tools and products come up by the day, including from our own YC batch.