We first launched @Basedash earlier this year as an AI-native chart builder. You just describe the chart you want, and Basedash uses AI to visualize your data, no SQL required.
Now we're gearing up for our biggest update yet, launching here on Product Hunt tomorrow. Without spoiling anything, it should enable many more business users to finally get the data answers they need, without bugging engineers or data analysts on their team.
Basedash
@maxmusing Hey Max, congrats on shipping Skills 🎉
The "lightweight semantic layer rather than a system prompt" framing is the right one. Most teams reinvent this badly as a growing pile of prompt caveats that nobody owns. Pulling definitions into durable, admin-managed context is the actual fix.
Question on the governance side: what happens when skills drift or conflict? Say an admin defined "activation rate" six months ago, the business changed how it counts it, but the old skill is still live. Or two skills define "active user" slightly differently. Does Basedash surface the conflict, version skills with a clear "current" pointer, or does the most recently fetched one just win? Asking because the value of a semantic layer is only as good as its freshness, and that is exactly where these systems quietly rot.
The visible tool call in the thinking trace is a great touch by the way. "Reading Activation rate skill" before answering is the difference between trust and black box.
Basedash
Thanks @artem_fedorovich! It's up to the user to manage their skills, but the AI will intelligently work through conflicts and ask the user for clarification if it needs additional context. The AI can also pull context from your existing dashboards to understand how your team is actually calculating metrics that are being referenced.
Moving definitions out of one-off prompts and into shared durable context is exactly the lightweight semantic layer most teams skip until they're already drowning in inconsistent metric defs. How do you handle drift when someone updates a Skill that's been silently feeding 12 different surfaces — version pin, broadcast, or both?
Basedash
@eran_shayshon totally agree, and soon we'll allow the AI to manage its own skills automatically so you won't even have to think about it. If you anyone updates a skill we make it easy to broadcast changes with our AI agent. You just tell it "I updated our NRR skill, please update all charts referencing this metric to use the new formula" and it will update everything for you.
this is a very handy tool for founders, but I have a question on how are you handling large dataset like clickstream locally and does the data site locally even after ETL?
Basedash
Hey @harshalvc_ai we can either connect directly to certain sources like Postgres, BigQuery, PostHog, or we can ETL data from external systems into a hosted Basedash Warehouse that we manage for you. Either way we can handle large datasets securely and performantly so that our AI agent can work efficiently.
Basedash
The origin of this was pretty unglamorous. We kept watching people paste the same definition of activation or churn into chat, then into a chart prompt, then into an automation, and every time they'd phrase it slightly differently and get slightly different numbers. The model was doing exactly what we asked but we were just asking five versions of the same question lol.
Skills came out of fixing that for ourselves. You write the definition down once, in plain language, and from then on any agent in the workspace reaches for it when the topic comes up. A new person can ask "how's activation trending" on day one and get the same answer the rest of the team would get, because the agent is reading the same playbook everyone else's agent reads.
If you've got a metric that means something specific at your company and you're tired of explaining it to the AI every single time, give it a try and tell us where it falls short!
Basedash
6 months ago I didn't understand skills. They're just... markdown files? They felt like a worse version of rules (where you can actually define when they're triggered). But the fact that they're so simple is what makes them so good.
Excited to now support them in Basedash.
Natural language to chart is a familiar idea, but curious how Basedash handles ambiguous questions - like when 'active user' could mean three different things depending on the team?