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Show HN: DAC – open-source dashboard as code tool for agents and humans

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Re: Show HN: DAC – open-source dashboard as code tool for agents and humans

#31

Post by karakanb »

hasyimibhar wrote: post #18
karakanb wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are quite a few libraries for charts and visualization, there are not as many for actually combining many of them with layouts, different components and including the actual implementation of the backend. Dac aims to provide all that as a standard and an implementation.

I mean that's what the Vega team is doing no? They are building the standard grammar (Vega-Lite), along with an implementation (Vega). And they are already quite established with rich ecosystem, and supports a ton of components[0]. The only thing missing is that it expects a CSV or inline data source. But it's probably not too hard to build an extension that connects to a data warehouse with an SQL query. [0] https:/…

I am not sure we are on the same page, as far as I am aware Vega doesn't do layout, does it? E.g DAC could use Vega for the charts and still take care of everything else around it.

Re: Show HN: DAC – open-source dashboard as code tool for agents and humans

#32

Post by karakanb »

m_ramdhan wrote: post #28

The "agents as primary user" framing is what makes this stand out from other dashboard-as-code tools. Having agents generate dashboards is one thing, but making those dashboards reviewable and standardized is the actual hard part. Curious about the semantic layer — when an agent modifies a metric definition in semantic/, how does validation work? Does DAC flag downstream widgets that would break, or is it more of a "…

Thanks! DAC does that kind of validation partially, although doesn't validate the usage of the downstream dashboards. That's a very nice idea though.

In terms of validation it will validate queries, metric definitions, chart definitions and all ahead of time, before render. That way agents tend to validate their work much quicker.

Re: Show HN: DAC – open-source dashboard as code tool for agents and humans

#33

Post by karakanb »

xixixao wrote: post #20

Why do ppl think building something through yaml is ever a good idea?? (I know why: for a platform it’s simpler to parse a yaml than to run code, but it’s almost never a good idea for anything that needs to scale in complexity)

DAC currently supports YAML and JSX, what else would be a good alternative?

Re: Show HN: DAC – open-source dashboard as code tool for agents and humans

#34

Post by karakanb »

sumeno wrote: post #29

Yet another "Show HN" that has existed for less than a week. I wish the rules against AI generated content were applied to all these too.

The project has been under development for over 6 months. We just open sourced it with a clean history. I am not sure what you expect here, should a project exist for months before it is worthy of a show post?

Re: Show HN: DAC – open-source dashboard as code tool for agents and humans

#36

Post by gervwyk »

Well done on the launch! We’ve doubled down on the apps as YAML paradigm a few years ago and its pay great dividends on all fronts, esp now with code gen spinning out apps faster than ever for us (generated yaml). Our largest app is well over 500k lines of yaml - for those complaining about 1000 lines lol. With the right tool stack and conventions its so much easier to read, write. review and maintain. Shameless plug, we’ve built Lowdefy (open source) and 100s of dashboards using it. Have a look and keen to unpack if you’re interested in sharing experiences. Specially have a look at what we did with operators for dynamic needs. https://github.com/lowdefy/lowdefy

Re: Show HN: DAC – open-source dashboard as code tool for agents and humans

#37

Post by seattle_spring »

m_ramdhan wrote: post #28

The "agents as primary user" framing is what makes this stand out from other dashboard-as-code tools. Having agents generate dashboards is one thing, but making those dashboards reviewable and standardized is the actual hard part. Curious about the semantic layer — when an agent modifies a metric definition in semantic/, how does validation work? Does DAC flag downstream widgets that would break, or is it more of a "…

Is this an AI generated comment? The format follows almost exactly the format of your other comments, down to the location of the em-dash.

Re: Show HN: DAC – open-source dashboard as code tool for agents and humans

#39

Post by pryanshu89 »

Hnrobert42 wrote: post #23
pryanshu89 wrote: post #21

I would really hesitate to use a 1000 lines of yaml and modify them. I never found YAML easy to modify after a certain size.

You have trouble with them when you are modifying them by hand or using an LLM to do it? The purpose of this project is having LLMs do it. I found they are about as good at writing yaml as they are writing anything else.

I do it by hand.

Re: Show HN: DAC – open-source dashboard as code tool for agents and humans

#40

Post by laurels-marts »

What I’ve heard often is that the customer might want to build a dashboard using AI on the fly.

Like imagine you have a site and there’s blank canvas. It has access to some data in the background. The user might be like “build a dashboard showing YoY performance of X and break down the shipments in a table by Y and Z”. Then the agent builds it and persists it such that when they log out and log back in they can see their custom dashboard they assembled themselves.

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