Show HN: Data Formulator – interactive AI agents for data analysis (Microsoft)
data-formulator.aiI almost skipped this as more AI wrapper shovelware. Would benefit from putting "Microsoft" in the title.
One area for exploration is letting people turn natural language questions into non-LLM queries, UIs, & dashboards. In other words to let non-engineers codify their questions into queries they can review for correctness and then take the LLM out of the picture.
Imagine if your CEO could ask natural language questions, build their own dashboard, review the generated queries for correctness, and be able to see deterministic results on any metric they care about - without having to ask an intern and without a multi-hour turnaround while it’s implemented.
Codification is kind of the best of both worlds and the underlying idea (explore with an LLM & then codify into something fast and deterministic when ready) is quite universal.
Yes, you definitely need need for a codification layer.
I think a semantic layer is the best way to do that for analytics. Having an LLM write bespoke SQL to answer every question will fail fast.
e.g. if you ask for "revenue by month" against a Snowflake warehouse with hundreds of tables, you are guaranteed to get different answers over multiple attempts.
We[1] use an agent to build a semantic layer over time at Definite so you get consistent results.
0 - https://www.loom.com/share/2da829dd440e489a8f7e3906c7083048
When install Data Formulator locally, it's possible to connect DF to databases with connection parameters in UI. To add more data loaders, there is a common template.
1 more comments available on Hacker News