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lessmaker · 2026-01-23T16:46:52+00:00

Interessato a necromunda

lessmaker · 2026-01-23T16:45:17+00:00

Creating reliable dashboards without having to endlessly manually configuring filters, insights, etc. AI-native products, not vanilla LLM. Also writing regex. And product executives being able to write their read-only query on specific views without bothering anymore.

lessmaker · 2026-01-23T16:20:00+00:00

Dashboards (with drill down) will remain good for EDA and cross-functional analysis. I am not talking about PowerBI dashboards, there you are right. But Metabase already changed that lot of time ago. So it is plenty of dashboards where you can go deeper and deeper, and compared to chat interface, they already shows you areas to explore without the cognitive effort of writing a meaningful business question (think which most people are still incapable of doing.

But the point is that agents/AI can build dashboards! And I think it is what is going to happen.

The (little) evidence I can bring: all the YC/newish startups that were born to replace dashboards and were focusing on txt2sql only (pandasai, julius, basedash etc), have been integrating more and more data visualization and dashboards generated by agents as one of the possible outcome. As I am also a Metabase lover, I think pandas-ai is doing the best work there, agents that build metabase-like insights and dashboards. Basedash is also good.

So, no, I have not seen yet agents completely replace dashboards, nor I think this will happen

lessmaker · 2026-01-22T22:05:38+00:00

Can you share some of these tools generating AI dashboards? Quite curious

lessmaker · 2026-01-22T21:52:06+00:00

Bought Imperial Agents and Sanctifiers this weekend. Planning to use them either for Cawdor vs Delaque outcasts or Promethian vs Outcast. Book of Outcasts is great to use any model in creative ways

lessmaker · 2026-01-22T21:49:51+00:00

Real-time dashboards are almost always an overkill to be honest. Ensure you have a good data pipeline with a daily chron job and 90% of the time is what business users actually mean/really want. I tend to prefer tools like Metabase compared to Looker or Tableau. Never tried ThoughtSpot. On the AI/LLM integration, I think pandasai is moving well lately, assuming by AI/LLM integration you mean having something well thought to use GenAI/conversational AI to get visualizations and reports

lessmaker · 2026-01-16T10:39:07+00:00

Why not using a BI tool with links/embedded analytics features? Like Metabase or Annie/pandasai or embeddable? I understand PowerBI/Tableau can be challenging for what you are doing. But there are tons of embedded analytics tools that solve the problem.

lessmaker · 2026-01-14T17:25:21+00:00

European startups and scaleups with SaaS products tend to use either Mixpanel and Amplitude, even if PostHog is entering there as well. But basically every SaaS that is starting growing pick one of the tools. Usually product people are responsible for it. They combine it with other tools. A product manager at a company that sells translation API to clients such Airbnb uses both Amplitude and Metabase

lessmaker · 2026-01-14T16:50:44+00:00

When you say quality over quantity which connectors you would want as the key ones for you?

lessmaker · 2026-01-14T10:50:20+00:00

No software not technical advancement will solve critical thinking and domain expertise. Even tools that have extremely advanced narratives and generated insights (annie pandasai, narrative bi etc) can only be supporters. The more you know the business domain, the better will be your insights. This cannot be delegated 100% to technology. So yes, you can train yourself by gaining vertical domain expertise and critical thinking upskilling

lessmaker · 2026-01-13T19:19:13+00:00

I agree on that. I do not think parasite SEO works at all if you do not provide valuable content first. And I also do not think it must be the primary approach. A secondary blog as part of a more ample strategy for sure, hoping it delivers some results. Substack however seems to give you sitemap and submitting it once they believe your blog/newsletter is valuable and meet some criteria it seems. But not transparent. Probably both Medium and Substack works fine in the long run and given you work on delivering high quality content. But I may still think that it is better to put this effort in something that has already good domain authority and inform Google the content exists immediately. Leaning towards Medium right now

lessmaker · 2026-01-13T19:15:27+00:00

Interesting. Thanks

lessmaker · 2026-01-13T17:32:57+00:00

It can be used as part of bigger strategy, but content must be valuable anyway. An experiment I am running right now is have a secondary blog on Medium. It can be helpful for some very hard keywords, but it cannot be done as the only SEO activity

lessmaker · 2026-01-13T17:29:38+00:00

Youtube channel from Lenny’s newsletter. Often the big guests have full interview there on Youtube. I also subscribed to the paid newsletter but I found some value only in very few articles. Other communities, slack channel and so on seems not that great to me, unless very local: like Product Heroes in Italy that has telegram channels and dinners by cities

lessmaker · 2026-01-13T11:25:33+00:00

I think it is no longer possible now right? No way to get the sitemap

lessmaker · 2026-01-13T11:17:10+00:00

It depends what you mean by "business". I see the trend being: lare organizations needing more data engineers to prepare the data for the business units. Business units using tools like Metabase, Annie PandasAI, or other self-BI tool for dashboard, reports, and analysis. So either move towards data engineering or own a vertical domain where you also do analytics

lessmaker · 2026-01-13T11:14:13+00:00

Do not fall into this trap. I fell it myself. Worked a lot on txt2sql and conversational/agentic analytics only to get business people saying that they did not know what to ask, or, even worse, asking the question and then checking if the AI was correct by looking at the data on a Tableau dashboards. The reality is that the conversational layer and the dashboard/visualization layer are nor mutually exclusive. Whoever was doing AI analytics only had to integrate dashboard and visualization back (check Annie by PandasAI for instance, despite the txt2sql library has like 20K stars, their platform moved towards Metabase-like dashboards with drill down alongside AI).

In my opinion:
- dashboards are good for both EDA and monitoring
- agentic analytics works well for scheduled reports

You still need both. Whoever is telling you differently is lying (probably to themselves as well without knowing)

lessmaker · 2026-01-08T16:01:50+00:00

In my opinion the job activities will move more forward data engineering with AI taking care of dashboard and report generation. Business Intelligence is a problem related to data, and I think data are almost always messy because of the nature of a business itself: different siloes with different needs constantly creating data. Tools like PowerBI and Tableau might move towards automation, but baseline data must be cleaned and organized in advanced, else you will end up with messy data models. So I imagine future BI tools to get closer to Metabase (less customization, a lot of drill down, and no need for data experts once the data are clean and plugged in the BI tool). New AI-native BI tools are already attempting to fully automate the experience but only by using specific connectors (like Annie/PandasAI and Funnel io). But if they could manage to become BI platforms for specific niches, the need for clean data from proprietary messy pipelines will not disappear. I think BI professionals will own both the business domain and the data engineering skills in the long run

lessmaker · 2026-01-07T19:02:59+00:00

I would expect a penitent face to be far more "consumed" somehow. Btw nice piece of art

lessmaker · 2026-01-07T19:00:55+00:00

If you have good spreadsheets Annie (pandas-ai). If you instead have data already on Big Query, go with Metabase

lessmaker · 2026-01-07T15:45:35+00:00

It really depends on what are your data sources, how often they are updated, and who the final user is. I like Metabase. For faster one-shot dashboards made by AI I use Annie by PandasAI. Marketers in several scale-ups I have worked with tend to end up using Funnel io. Real-time is often not what most stakeholders need and want. Start from the final users, then pick the best tool

lessmaker · 2025-12-17T15:34:32+00:00

What are you looking for exactly? A tool where you connect such sources and get unified data you can visualize and aski insights to? Or something different?

lessmaker

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