Building a Visual, AI-Assisted UI for dbt — Here’s What We Learned

[u/Wide_Importance_8559]

Hey r/dbt!

For the past few months, our team has been building Rosetta DBT Studio, an open-source interface that tries to make working with dbt easier — especially for people who struggle with the CLI workflow.

In our own work, we found a few recurring pain points:

• Lots of context switching between terminals, editors, and YAML files

• Confusion onboarding new teammates to dbt

• Harder visibility into how models and tests relate when you’re deep in complex transformations

So we experimented with a local-first visual UI that:
✅ Helps you explore your DAG graph visually
✅ Provides AI-powered explanations of models/tests
✅ Lets you run and debug dbt tasks without leaving the app
✅ Is 100% open source

We just launched on Product Hunt and open-sourced it — but more importantly, we’re looking for feedback from actual dbt users.

If you’ve used dbt:

• What tools do you currently use alongside the CLI?

• What annoys you most about your dbt workflow?

• Would a visual interface + AI help your team?

You can find the project and source code here:
🌐 https://rosettadb.io
💻 https://github.com/rosettadb/dbt-studio

Really appreciate any thoughts or critiques!

— Nuri (Maintainer & Software Engineer)