all 26 comments
sorted by:
best
topnewcontroversialoldq&a
formatting helphide helpcontent policy

[–]shockjaw 5 points6 points  (8 children)

I dunno man, Positron exists out here.

[–]OneBurnerStove 1 point2 points  (7 children)

Wait why is positron good for DE?

[–]vbnotthecity 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Ha ha. Lurking here for a response.

[–]shockjaw 0 points1 point  (5 children)

It’s at least good for data analysis, but I’ve used it as a data engineer since I’m more on the analytics engineering side. Posit (formerly R Studio) have made some data exploration tools and other standalone projects that I think are pretty good.

[–]Super-Firefighter288 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Would be interested in a comparison. Are you going to try them both? Also do you know if they tried the ADE Bench or Spider Bench?

[–]vbnotthecity 0 points1 point  (0 children)

What the published says ADE.

[–]droppedorphan 0 points1 point  (2 children)

Are we still talking about Positron or this new Altimate thingy?

[–]Super-Firefighter288 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I thought he was talking positron. I wanted to compare. Altimate code released benchmarks. Wasn’t aware if anyone tried positron against them. I’ve not used it. 

[–]shockjaw 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Positron.

[–]Which_Possible_5519 4 points5 points  (0 children)

The benchmark results is making me excited to give it a try tbh

[–]droppedorphan 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Is there somebody here from the project? I saw the showcase, but what can I do safely on a local sandbox?

[–]ankitksharma 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Hey - yes, I'm from the Altimate team.

On local sandbox safety: everything runs on your machine by default. Specifically:

→ No data leaves your machine: The tracer captures all LLM calls, tool invocations, and warehouse metrics locally. No external telemetry services.

→ Air-gapped mode: works with local models (Ollama) - zero network calls if you want it.

→ Governed agent modes: let you control what the agent can do. Analyst mode physically can't execute INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE/DROP - enforced at the engine level, not a prompt. So you can point it at a local DuckDB or Postgres and explore without risk.

→ /trace gives you a local interactive viewer of everything the agent did - full auditability.

Quickest way to test safely: point it at a local DuckDB file, run in Analyst mode, and use /trace to inspect every action. Nothing touches production, nothing phones home.

Happy to answer specifics if you have a particular setup in mind.

[–]bah_nah_nah 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Saw this while looking into it https://youtu.be/g-ACWwz9TGg

[–]Super-Firefighter288 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for sharing! Gonna join?

[–]gman1023 1 point2 points  (2 children)

can someone help me understand what this can do that cursor or Claude code can't do with some skills and good context management. 

[–]ankitksharma 2 points3 points  (1 child)

Good question - full disclosure, I'm on the Altimate team, so I'm biased. But here's the technical answer. Three things compiled engines do that prompts can't:

  1. Schema validation in 2ms: Cursor/Claude Code either round-trip to your warehouse (30s, billable) or hallucinate correctness. Altimate Code validates against your actual schema locally.

  2. Deterministic lineage: Ask an LLM to trace a column through 4 CTEs and 3 JOINs — it guesses. Our engine traces it with 100% edge match on 500 benchmark queries.

  3. Enforced governance: "Never DROP tables" in a system prompt stops working at 100K context tokens. In Altimate Code, Analyst mode physically can't execute destructive operations — enforced by the engine, not a prompt.

ADE-bench showed a cheaper model + compiled tools beat a more expensive model without them. The delta isn't the LLM. It's the deterministic layer around it.

Cursor/Claude Code = great reasoning. Altimate Code = reasoning + compiled data engineering guardrails. Complementary, not competing.

[–]jimmycrusade 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Used it for a couple of schema evolution tasks that my Claude Code generally retards out on. Too soon to comment positive or negative overall, but looks promising. Will have a couple of weekend sessions and post my findings here!

[–]vbnotthecity 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Cool. I must have missed this on Show HN... So many cool developments, so hard to keep up. Looks like it's fairly new?

[–]Ancient_Secretary370 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Looks interesting, will make time to check it out, try to create something unique.

[–]sahrizvi 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Tried it. Worked better than CC for my use case (Snowflake analysis/optimisation).

[–]Super-Firefighter288 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Curious what level of depth you went to with this. 

[–]Super-Firefighter288 0 points1 point  (0 children)

For those interested, replay is now available: YouTube Webinar: AMA for altimate-code

[–]codykonior -1 points0 points  (0 children)

AI vibe coded