dbt Charts: a new open-source language for dashboards that live inside your dbt repo
Last edited on Oct 27, 2026
Dave Fowler, general manager and head of the dbt Charts project, and RJ Andrews, dbt Charts' designer and self-described chartographer, introduced dbt Charts, a new open-source language for building dashboards that dbt Labs launched the Monday of dbt Summit 2026 at dbtcharts.com.
The problem, as Fowler laid it out, is that AI tools have gotten good at vibe-coding a dashboard from a prompt, but every one comes out differently: a different mix of JavaScript, Python, CSS, and charting libraries, hard to keep consistent, harder still for an analytics engineer to trace back to the underlying query when a business user asks them to double-check it.
Traditional BI tools have the opposite problem: they're UI-first products with AI bolted on afterward, which limits how much an AI agent can actually change.
dbt Charts is a simple YAML syntax, built around variables, queries, charts, and rows for layout, that Fowler compared to a markdown for dashboards. It adds a charts folder that sits next to a dbt project's models folder, so renaming a column or updating a model runs through the same git tests and deploys in the same branch as everything else.
The language itself is open source under Apache 2.0, the same license as dbt, and can run locally through a CLI called dct. A hosted product at dbtcharts.com layers on permissioning, sharing, a visual editor, version history, and a conversational AI interface for building and editing dashboards.
Andrews, a historian of data graphics, walked through the design defaults built into dbt Charts: direct labels instead of legends, decimal-aligned support tables so numbers scan cleanly down a column, and axis labels placed on whichever side keeps a reader's eye on the most recent data.
The goal is for a dashboard built entirely on dbt Charts defaults, with no custom styling, to already look like something worth spending time reading. In a live demo, Fowler edited chart titles, colors, and markdown text directly on a dashboard, then reverted the whole page to an earlier version using its built-in git history.
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