alt Hacker NewsThis looks really slick! I was building something similar, so visuals are re-useable artifacts that external services know how to render, where we ask agents in whatever the interface is, slack, team's other agentic harnesses etc. and the agents receive the spec from the service, in this case dbt charts. if there was a unified spec that was agreed upon these third-party harnesses and apps would all speak the same charting language which would be super cool. I haven't read through it in detail but how does this differ from something like https://github.com/vega/vega-lite
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