Hacker News: mollifier14

New comment by mollifier14 in "Charts built for Chat"

mollifier14 — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:25:05 +0000

AI can definitely generate whatever you tell it to do, but what to do with that artifact afterwards? If you want it to be reusable it needs to be a well-defined structured protocol/language. What good is a YAML describing a chart if all I can do is to give it back to the agent and say "read this and create a chart from it", the result will be vastly different from the chart you got the first time.

New comment by mollifier14 in "Charts built for Chat"

mollifier14 — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:21:41 +0000

We actually use vega-lite under the hood. vega-lite is vast tool set to build charts with static data. dbt Charts adds a whole layer on top of that, which is dashboards with repeatable SQL queries. Also dbt Charts comes with a lot of opinionated chart style ideas. So vega-lite is a toolbox for chart assembly, and we use that toolbox to build dashboards.

On the standardized charting language, that would be the dream. All agents giving the same spec when they want to build a chart or dashboard, and then having different renderers of that. That is a steep goal. Such a language would need to be simple but still extremely versatile. I'm not sure that combination exists yet. Our language is simple and fairly versatile, but not as versatile as vega-lite itself, or JavaScript code even. Maybe we can evolve in that direction though

New comment by mollifier14 in "Charts built for Chat"

mollifier14 — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 23:40:42 +0000

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

New comment by mollifier14 in "Charts built for Chat"

mollifier14 — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 23:30:47 +0000

I think we're still ways out until companies will blindly trust AI that the data they pulled is correct. If a data team member sees a dashboard or chart, their first questions is "Is the SQL below this chart correct?". The easier it is to see the SQL that pulled the data, the better.

New comment by mollifier14 in "Charts built for Chat"

mollifier14 — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 22:09:13 +0000

A beacon of hope between all the vibe coded JS slop charts and dashboards! I love that this creates artifacts that are readable, maintainable and reproduce the same dashboard consistently (deterministically!), just with fresh data.