I liked Hex. I introduced it to my company and now it has become the main BI tool.
However, since they started pushing the whole AI thing I no longer like them.
It may speed up doing analytics, but makes everything hard to maintain, creates a ton of duplication and adds yet another layer to take care of.
I also think AI may come back to bite them in the ass. What's the point of an analytics platform is you can create dashboards from scratch directly using AI. What are they adding to the table?
They should have stuck to just making developers lives easier instead of that weird objective that is trying to make analytics accessible for everyone
The reliable layer that captures the data. That is what they bring to the table. For now.
Once AI can orchestrate and maintain a project with dozens of clients without slipping, they will be relegated to non-technical SMBs - many enterprises would just build their own shit. No contracts to sign. Full control. AI hosts and maintains. Great.
Then they might pivot to security (heck I would if I were in any SaaS business today).
that is one of the most unhinged landing pages i've ever seen, it looks like a vibe coded claude mess that somehow raised 100M
is no one looking at what they're releasing anymore? do people just not care? i guess they don't have to if some intern can just prompt "make cool website for our useless company" and then 100M appears at your door from eager VCs
> And this was leading to some major issues: our agent harness was becoming bloated with hundreds of tools, which were required to teach agents about how to use Hex-something emphatically out of distribution. Our compatibility with external agents, because those products were having to use Hex through a keyhole via MCP versus being able to work with something more native. And our compute engine wasn’t built to support the high-speed, high-concurrency, iterative workflows agents seem to like.
I'm having déjà vu... I read almost the same thing word for word ~6 months ago. I think it was from an open source project.
Edit: February, but it was published in November:
What I learned building an opinionated and minimal coding agent
Actually I think I've seen the same thing three or four times this year. But yeah, actually solving the actual problems you actually have is a good idea :)
I used to use Hex but Marimo (OSS local first) honestly renders it completely obsolete for me
It similarly offers the combo of SQL and dataframes, built in dataviz and UI widgets, great LLM integration and essentially everything else one would want from either a notebook or a BI tool
How do you share a dashboard built in Marimo with someone that doesn't have any coding experience (for example someone from marketing)
Can you host it somewhere?
Downvote me if you want, I'm flaunting the guidelines in service of the discourse.
If I may posthumously discipline the horse - when did the suffixes "-native" and "-first" merge in unholy matrimony?
Was it when B2B marketing realized that engineers equated "native" with "best/fastest/simplest solution available"? Or is it even more stupid than that?
I liked Hex. I introduced it to my company and now it has become the main BI tool.
However, since they started pushing the whole AI thing I no longer like them.
It may speed up doing analytics, but makes everything hard to maintain, creates a ton of duplication and adds yet another layer to take care of.
I also think AI may come back to bite them in the ass. What's the point of an analytics platform is you can create dashboards from scratch directly using AI. What are they adding to the table?
They should have stuck to just making developers lives easier instead of that weird objective that is trying to make analytics accessible for everyone
The reliable layer that captures the data. That is what they bring to the table. For now.
Once AI can orchestrate and maintain a project with dozens of clients without slipping, they will be relegated to non-technical SMBs - many enterprises would just build their own shit. No contracts to sign. Full control. AI hosts and maintains. Great.
Then they might pivot to security (heck I would if I were in any SaaS business today).
> https://hex.tech/
that is one of the most unhinged landing pages i've ever seen, it looks like a vibe coded claude mess that somehow raised 100M
is no one looking at what they're releasing anymore? do people just not care? i guess they don't have to if some intern can just prompt "make cool website for our useless company" and then 100M appears at your door from eager VCs
> And this was leading to some major issues: our agent harness was becoming bloated with hundreds of tools, which were required to teach agents about how to use Hex-something emphatically out of distribution. Our compatibility with external agents, because those products were having to use Hex through a keyhole via MCP versus being able to work with something more native. And our compute engine wasn’t built to support the high-speed, high-concurrency, iterative workflows agents seem to like.
I'm having déjà vu... I read almost the same thing word for word ~6 months ago. I think it was from an open source project.
Edit: February, but it was published in November:
What I learned building an opinionated and minimal coding agent
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46844822
Actually I think I've seen the same thing three or four times this year. But yeah, actually solving the actual problems you actually have is a good idea :)
I used to use Hex but Marimo (OSS local first) honestly renders it completely obsolete for me
It similarly offers the combo of SQL and dataframes, built in dataviz and UI widgets, great LLM integration and essentially everything else one would want from either a notebook or a BI tool
How do you share a dashboard built in Marimo with someone that doesn't have any coding experience (for example someone from marketing) Can you host it somewhere?
You can self-host marimohub (BYO compute, object storage, auth, managed AI, etc)
https://github.com/marimo-team/marimohub
We built a much simpler alternative to this over complicated mess that is Hex.
If you're interested in using it, you can 1-click deploy.
https://dbpro.app/studio
Fascinating. We used to use it quite a bit. But nowadays its just claude + skills.
Downvote me if you want, I'm flaunting the guidelines in service of the discourse.
If I may posthumously discipline the horse - when did the suffixes "-native" and "-first" merge in unholy matrimony?
Was it when B2B marketing realized that engineers equated "native" with "best/fastest/simplest solution available"? Or is it even more stupid than that?