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Insights on AI agents, data engineering, Snowflake, dbt, and analytics.
Latest posts
Databricks Serverless vs Classic Compute: Which One Is Actually Cheaper?
Whenever somebody mentions serverless, two things come to mind: it should be cheaper than normal resources and no infrastructure…
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Understanding Databricks DBU and Compute Costs
There is so much around Databricks cost optimization techniques, strategies, approaches, what to do, what not to do, and many…
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Power User for dbt Can Now Tell You Why Your Model Is Slow
The queries that cost you money usually aren't the ones anyone complains about. A dbt model ships to prod looking fine, then…
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Autonomous Agents for Snowflake Cost Optimization: Announcing Altimate Lite
TL;DR: it saves you money on Snowflake Altimate Lite is a Snowflake native app that automatically tunes warehouse configuration…
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What AI Agents Are Really Changing in Data Engineering
Now that job candidates write their resumes and rehearse their interview answers with AI, every application reads the same. "Now…
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Altimate Code vs Claude Code vs Cursor vs Cortex Code CLI
Altimate Code vs Claude Code vs Cursor vs Cortex Code CLI. What each agent does for a data team, what it costs, and which one…
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Why AI Agents Break in Production: The Missing Harness in Your Data Stack
Listen to the full conversation on DataScienceWithSam, available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Most data teams have lived some…
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A 6-Step Playbook for dbt Migration With an AI Agent
A six-step playbook for dbt migration with an AI agent that treats business-logic parity as the deliverable.
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5 Reasons Deterministic Tooling for AI Agents Beats an LLM-Only Stack
Some questions about your data have exact answers. Five reasons deterministic tooling for AI agents beats a model on those, and…
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4 Blind Spots of General Coding Agents in Data Engineering
A coding agent enters the data warehouse A data engineer drops a one-liner into Claude Code: "Add patient_visit_count to…
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7 dbt Anti-Patterns AI Should Catch Before Your PR Merges
Seven dbt anti-patterns that pass review and cost you later, why each one survives a human read, and the check that catches it…
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Where AI Agents Belong in Data Engineering: The Correctness Layer
With ever-changing models, new and better ones coming out every few months, it's great if we don't have to rely on them too…
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8 Column-Level Lineage Use Cases That Change How Teams Ship
Eight column-level lineage use cases where knowing which field, not just which table, changes the work rather than the reporting.
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You Are the Trust Layer: Why AI Code Review Is Breaking Down
Your Job Just Became QA for an AI Pipeline You Didn't Design Sometime this year your job changed, and nobody sent the memo. You…
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9 Best Agentic Data Engineering Tools for VS Code
Nine agentic data engineering tools for VS Code, scored on warehouse context, dbt awareness, cost visibility and license, with…
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DeepSeek Cost 62% Less Than Claude. The Surprising Part Wasn't the Savings…
If you're running an AI agent on data (pipeline diagnostics, schema exploration, ad-hoc SQL, lineage queries), you've looked at…
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10 Best MCP Servers for Data Engineering Teams
MCP lets an agent look things up instead of guessing. Ten best MCP servers for data engineering, what each exposes, and the…
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The Great Token Heist of ‘26
Your LLM provider charges by the token, but a token is not a portable unit of work, a unit of meaning, or any unit you can…
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12 Snowflake Cost Optimization Techniques That Actually Work
Twelve Snowflake cost optimization techniques ranked by what they save against what they cost you to run, from free config…
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The Correctness Layer
We started altimate-code with one goal: build a harness that data engineers could actually trust with their pipelines and…
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Blast Radius Analysis Using Altimate Code
What is Blast Radius Blast radius refers to the potential extent of damage. For example, before you knock down a wall in your…
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9 Signs You Need an Agent-First Data Platform
Most AI agent pilots stall on the platform underneath them, not the model. Nine diagnostics for whether you need an agent-first…
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We Created Data Engineering Skills for Claude Code
Data engineering work spreads beyond SQL into lineage, tests, docs, cost, schema changes, and PII. We built skills that bring…
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Best Data Conferences 2026: The Complete Guide
If you're trying to figure out which remaining data conferences in 2026 are worth your time and travel budget, this is the list…
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10 Reasons AI Coding Agents Fail at Data Engineering
AI coding agents fail at data engineering for one structural reason. Ten specific failure modes, why each one happens, and the…
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Claude Code or Altimate Code for Data Engineering?
Claude Code is fast, writes good software code, and can even handle dbt models and other data engineering tasks to certain…
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We built AI that actually works for data engineering. We crushed the ADE benchmark.
tl;dr : Today, we are launching Altimate Code, an open-source agentic data engineering harness that far exceeds generic LLMs (and…
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Teaching Claude Code the Art of Data Engineering: Introducing Altimate Skills
Today, we're open-sourcing Altimate Skills — a collection of Claude Code skills specifically designed for analytics engineers. We…
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Adaptive Compute vs. Auto Tune: A Practical Guide to Optimizing Snowflake Warehouses
Managing Snowflake warehouses efficiently is a constant balancing act. Set them too large, and you're burning money on idle…
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Supercharging Cursor IDE: How the dbt Power User Extension’s Embedded MCP Server Unlocks AI-Driven dbt Development
Introduction We’re excited to announce a major new capability in the dbt Power User VSCode extension: an embedded Model Context…
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Could AI Teammates Be the Secret to Efficient Snowflake Cost Management?
In the past five years, Snowflake has disrupted the database, data storage, and analytics industry by massively simplifying the…
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Write Better Data Docs Faster
Once upon a time, an analyst in the trouble Imagine Leila, an analyst, asked to build a monitoring dashboard for finance - given…
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Can AI Agents reduce Snowflake Cost using Dynamic Tables?
In my previous article on Dynamic Tables, I explained their purpose, to help simplify building transformation pipelines for…
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How I Cut dbt Development Time by 20% with the Power User Vscode Extension
Working with data in any capacity—be it as a data/analytics engineer, data scientist, or data analyst—inevitably dealing with the…
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Optimizing Snowflake Queries : Expert Strategies for Data Engineers and Analysts
For data teams, the clock is always ticking. In a business landscape defined by rapidly expanding datasets, slow queries can…
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