When you say just Cortex it is ambiguous as there is Cortex Search, Agents, Analyst, and Code.
Cortex Code is available via web and cli. The web version is good. I've used the cli and it is fine too, though I prefer the visuals of the web version when looking at data outputs. For writing code it is similar to a Codex or Claude Code. It is data focussed I gather more so than other options and has great hooks into your snowflake tables. You could do similar actions with Snowpark and say Claude Code. I find Snowflake focus on personas are more functional than pure technical so the Cortex Code fits well with it. Though if you want to do your own thing you can use your own IDE and code agent and there you are back to having an option with the Codex Code CLI along with Codex, Cursor or Claude Code.
We've (https://www.definite.app/) replaced quite a few metabase accounts now and we have a built-in lakehouse using duckdb + ducklake, so I feel comfortable calling us a "duckdb-based metabase alternative".
When I see the title here, I think "BI with an embedded database", which is what we're building at Definite. A lot of people want dashboards / AI analysis without buying Snowflake, Fivetran, BI and stitching them all together.
If this had happened prior to 4PM Eastern, I would have been screwed on my main early-stage project. I guess it's time to move up the timeline on real backend with failover.
> when you connect a warehouse like Snowflake, BigQuery, or Postgres
I'm curious what others are seeing connecting AI tools to Snowflake. Snowflake charges $3 per compute hour and it's pretty easy for an agent to run dozens of queries asynchronously.
As others have mentioned, if you want a notebook, compare this hard against Hex. It's unclear what LiveDocs would give you over Hex (cheaper maybe?).
ps - if you don't have Snowflake / data warehouse yet, we give you a full data platform (data lake + pipelines + dashboards + agent) at https://www.definite.app/.
Livedocs runs locally on your machine or on customer-managed infra, has full terminal access, supports canvas mode for building custom UIs (not just charts), and uses long-running agent workflows with sub-agents coordinating work over time, etc
There is a lot more to data work than just SQL + charts like the tool you mentioned
I guess they mean BI, but for a company of any scale, they aren't paying for a chart, they're paying for a permissions system, query caching, a modeling layer, scheduling, export to excel, etc.
Stand alone BI tools are going to struggle, but not because they can easily be vibe coded. It'll be because data platforms have BI built-in. Snowflake is starting down this direction and we're (https://www.definite.app/) trying to beat them to it.
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