Show HN: Graphene – Data analysis toolkit for your coding agent
github.comMy friend and I have worked at a number of BI companies and thought: Can’t a coding agent do most of this now?
Almost. They just need a context/semantic layer to ensure query correctness and some kind of artifact for publishing findings and visualizations.
We built an open source project called Graphene that provides these tools:
- Semantic layer that’s more token-efficient than YAML, more deterministic than Markdown (eg, composable, callable metric macros), with a query API that’s well in-distribution (SQL). - MDX-like files for dashboards (Markdown with inlined SQL + HTML components for viz with support for CSS and Javascript) - Connects to popular data warehouses or local DuckDB
Your coding agent will build really in-depth reports and can ofc leverage any other skills or context that you've made available to it. We dogfood it inside a monorepo with our website, app source code, planning docs, etc so the agent has access to a ton of context. It’s also nice that the agent can add instrumentation, adjust pipelines and transformations, and add dashboards all in one PR.
If you want to try it out, just point your coding agent at https://github.com/graphene-data/graphene/blob/main/docs/set... and ask it to set up Graphene.
If you don’t have data to play with, you can clone our example project:
1. `git clone <https://github.com/graphene-data/example-flights.git`> 2. `cd example-flights && npm install`
Would love any/all feedback!
Change the name.
Graphene for most of us here already means Graphene OS.
It feels off that as community members you either didn’t know this or just straight up chose ignore this or worse; chose to ride their brand; even if it’s technically allowed doesn’t mean everyone likes what your doing. It’s just mental overload with an avoidable namespace conflict.
TLDR; ask the LLM for a new name. Change it now when it’s low stakes.
What? I thought graphene was a graphql python: https://graphene-python.org/
Annnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnyways.
Even more evidence in the change the name corner, which I also second.
I suspect if the question was put to the LLM itself it would have flagged this. Somewhat ironic.
Agreed. When I read the headline I was wondering how this tied into the Graphene I knew.
I mean, in fairness these are two completely different domains. OS development and AI business intelligence are as far apart as one can get.
That being said, given the AI context, it does sound pretty shortsighted to choose an overly saturated existing name for your new product. AI agents or LLM chat bots will definitely be confused with prompts like "hey what's this graphene project?". Dunno how tthey missed that.
> Graphene for most of us here already means Graphene OS.
And for the rest, it is probably the actual Graphene as in the material [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphene
From now on, whenever we want to refer to particular software, as well as the name we're going to have to specify whether we mean the AI thing or the other thing.