In this wide-ranging conversation, we dive into:
🏷️ How he was early to data labeling - and what competitor ScaleAI got right
⚖️ Why Weights & Biases was built on the same thesis as GitHub
🚀 Why this is the best possible moment to start a company
www.rilldata.com/blog/how-the...
"We couldn't get people to use it for free, and people openly mocked it," said Lukas Biewald about what would become a $1.7B business, @weightsbiases.bsky.social
In the latest episode of Data Talks on the Rocks, Mike talks with Lukas about his journey building one of the seminal startups in AI.
Dashboards aren’t dead—but they’re evolving.
AI + metrics layers (like what Rill is building) are shifting us from static BI → conversational analytics.
Ask questions. Get answers. No SQL required.
The real unlock? Data access for everyone.
Mike's full interview 👇
tipsheet.ai/technology/r...
In the latest release of Rill 0.84, we provide an interactive "rill init" command by default, guiding you through project setup step by step.
Also, now you can share Canvas dashboard views with external stakeholders without requiring them to log in.
Full release notes
docs.rilldata.com/notes/0.84
Rill will be at #POSSIBLE2026 in Miami 😎🌴 We can't wait to get together with key decision-makers across the entire marketing ecosystem. Book a meeting and get a personal demo our agentic AI, BI-as-code experience. Go from raw data to interactive dashboards in mins!
www.rilldata.com/events/possi...
Salomon from Drio Tech prompted Claude to "create a PowerPoint presentation with an executive summary of our internal sales data for today's board meeting".
The entire process took just minutes & every number in the presentation was correct.
Full blog & video demo:
www.driotech.io/post/agentic...
Rill isn’t just developer-friendly — it’s agent-ready.
With built-in support for:
✅Cursor rules and instructions
✅Structured metric definitions
AI agents can:
✅Understand how to modify metrics
✅Generate analytics outputs automatically
Learn more:
www.rilldata.com/blog/video-b...
In this video, @jonwalls.dev walks through how Rill enables a fully agentic BI workflow using tools like Cursor, local development environments, and modern CI/CD practices — all while delivering instant, production-ready insights.
@medriscoll.com spoke to tipsheet about AI and his agentic analytics company.
Topics:
* The transition to solutions for humans and agents
* What is Conversational BI?
* Are APIs going away?
* The reasoning behind ‘local-first’ analytics
* Agent-to-agent future at scale
tipsheet.ai/technology/r...
The convergence of embedded analytics engines (DuckDB/MotherDuck), declarative BI-as-code (Rill), and AI agent protocols (MCP) is creating a new architecture for business intelligence, one where dashboards become code and analysts shift from clicking to prompting.
www.rilldata.com/blog/buildin...
Ghanshyam Chodavadiya from SWYM shares why they use Rill with MotherDuck.
"Rill lets us encode business context directly into our BI layer. Combined w/ MotherDuck & the Rill MCP client, it gives us flexible data control while powering automatically generated client dashboards & AI-driven insights."
In the latest Rill 0.83 release, now you can generate a full Canvas dashboard directly from an existing metrics view.
We also added a new connector for @supabase.com and updated the project status pages making it easier to start exploring your data in Rill.
docs.rilldata.com/notes/0.83
Guess who loves local-first, code-first analytics tools? 🤖 Claude Code.
Claude + Rill can now build a full data stack in seconds – pipelines, database, and dashboards visualizing millions of records – with BI-as-code, on a single machine.
Learn more:
www.rilldata.com/blog/buildin...
CLI-first is eating development. Email, calendar—they all have CLIs now. Why not your business metrics?
For data/analytics engineers building with agents: DuckDB + MotherDuck + Rill give you an #agentfriendly, #localfirst frontend—exact context via SQL and YAML.
Rill’s GTM team is growing 🚀
Jay Stevens is our new CRO. Jay has earned a reputation as a commercial leader who transforms businesses of all sizes for growth.
Devan Kane joins Rill as Fractional CMO, reuniting with Mike Driscoll to help spearhead the company’s growth strategy.
The Rill GTM team got together in Park City to strategize for 2026! 🚀
We reviewed the product roadmap and had meaningful conversations on how Rill can really make an impact for our customers. And we had some fun too 🥳
PS - we’re hiring! Join us in building the world’s fastest AI-native BI tool!
PS - we added support if Gemini is you’re preferred AI provider. Create a Gemini connector, set up your API key and you are good to go!
Check out the release notes to learn more:
docs.rilldata.com/notes/0.82
Check out what's new in Rill 0.82:
👍👎 AI feedback - give thumbs up or thumbs down to score your conversations with Rill's AI agent
ℹ️ New status project page - we overhauled the status page so you can easily search, filter & find resources
🎨 New in Canvas dashboards - AI functionality & scatter plots
ICYMI the latest Data Talks on the Rocks episode - Wes McKinney, creator of Pandas, explains his unexpected switch from Python to Go for new projects. His reason: AI coding agents fundamentally changed the trade-offs that made Python dominant for the last 15 years.
Learn more
datatalks.rilldata.com
ICYMI - Simon Spati interviewed Coinbase & Fresha and shares a common pattern - choose @starrocks.bsky.social when joins are key to your analytics.
If you want a real-time BI tool designed to benefit from StarRocks’ real-time query performance, check out Rill.
www.rilldata.com/blog/why-coi...
Our friends at Twing Data built a lightweight dashboard for AWS cost monitoring using Rill for AWS CUR data. A few key Rill features do most of the heavy lifting:
1. Automatic ingestion from S3:
2. Partition-aware updates:
3. ClickHouse under the hood
Learn more:
blog.twingdata.com/p/aws-cost-m...
ICYMI - on a recent Joe Reis podcast, Mike Driscoll shares insights on the "shape" of analytics, debating whether conversational interfaces will replace dashboards or simply complement them.
Links below:
YouTube -
www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEIQ...
Spotify - creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/...
Top Takeaways:
🐍 Why Go beats Python for agent-generated code
🤖 𝙧𝙤𝙗𝙤𝙧𝙚𝙫: using adversarial agents for continuous code review
🛠️ Live demo of building his Spicy Takes app with coding agents
🏛️ Why the next generation of developers must study architecture, not syntax
datatalks.rilldata.com
Are LLMs really a breakthrough?
Wes McKinney says he didn’t see it at first.
Now he says if your code isn’t automatically reviewed by adversarial agents, you’re doomed.
In the latest episode of Data Talks on the Rocks, Mike and Wes talk about how AI is transforming the way he builds software.
Many users have requested the ability to share AI conversations with others.
With Rill 0.81, now you can send a secure link and other users can see exactly what you saw and pick up where you left off.
We've also added support for Claude as your preferred AI provider.
docs.rilldata.com/notes/0.81
Today, I dig into the details of StarRocks and how it is gaining traction in the real-time database world.
DWH-like #joins and fast retrieval from a #Lakehouse-native data architecture, without additional data engineering work to persist and ingest data. www.ssp.sh/blog/starro...
Amazing talk about AI and the future of data visualization. @medriscoll.com argues why dashboards won't go away (can condense so much information you'd need 10 prompts) and also certain numbers you don't want to constantly prompt.
E.g. speed on your car, you don't want to ask every 10 seconds 🙂
🎧Listen now on your favorite platform🎧
Apple:
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t...
Spotify: creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/...
YouTube:
youtu.be/tEIQGgS4Zus
.@medriscoll.com was on The Joe Reis podcast to discuss the evolving landscape of business intelligence and data engineering. They explore why the industry keeps "rediscovering" old concepts like the semantic layer and how the rise of AI agents is forcing us to rethink how we structure data.
Our friends at Twing Data set out to build something simple: point a dashboard at S3, automatically ingest AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR) files, and instantly get a useful set of dashboards.
The whole thing is open source.
Post: blog.twingdata.com/p/aws-cost-m...
Repo: github.com/Twing-Data/a...
