DBT benefits from AI coding agents
The guest argued that DBT (Data Build Tool) will be a major beneficiary of the AI wave because coding agents will write massive volumes of DBT models to document business rules.
The argument
Even when AI writes the code, SQL queries in DBT projects remain essential as executable documentation of how a business works, leading to a surge in DBT usage as agents automate data transformation.
The thesis, stress-tested
✓ What validates it
- ✓A surge in automated pull requests and SQL model generation in enterprise DBT repositories
- ✓Increased adoption metrics for DBT's semantic layer driven by AI agent queries
▸ Risks discussed
- ▸AI agents bypassing DBT entirely by writing direct, unstructured queries to data lakes
- ▸Alternative semantic layer standards displacing DBT
Hear it yourself
"And then there's sort of the old guard who views it as SAP's data, and you'll do with it what what we tell you to. And, and and then, you know, historically, Salesforce has been really good with the exception of Slack where they are terrible. Yeah. Yeah. I know. But, they've started to get squirrelly Yeah. About this. So it's it's a moving target. I am hopeful that this is merely a brief flirtation with closed data by most of these vendors, and they will realize this is not a good idea, that they are at war with their own customers, and it's not even going to work anyway."