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Altimate Code Chat

What is Altimate Code?

Altimate Code is the open-source data engineering harness with 100+ deterministic tools for building, validating, optimizing, and shipping data products. It is built into the Altimate Workspaces extension, giving you AI-powered data engineering chat directly in your editor.

Getting Started

Open Altimate Code Chat

  1. Press Cmd+Shift+P (macOS) or Ctrl+Shift+P (Windows/Linux) to open the command palette
  2. Type Altimate Workspaces
  3. Select Altimate Workspaces: Open Altimate Code Chat

This opens the Altimate Code chat panel where you can interact with agents and use all 100+ data engineering tools alongside your workspace's integrations.

Features

Agent Modes

Altimate Code provides three agent modes to match your workflow:

Mode Access Level Use Case
Builder Full read/write Scaffolding dbt projects, writing models, generating tests and docs
Analyst Read-only Exploring schemas, running queries, analyzing lineage
Plan Minimal access Planning changes, reviewing impact before execution

100+ Data Engineering Tools

  • SQL Tools — Validation without execution, query optimization, anti-pattern detection, dialect translation, PII scanning
  • dbt Tools — Model generation, test generation, documentation generation, project scaffolding, troubleshooting
  • Lineage Tools — Column-level lineage, impact analysis, downstream dependency tracking
  • Schema Tools — Schema exploration, table/column discovery, metadata indexing
  • FinOps Tools — Cost analysis, warehouse spend reports, optimization recommendations
  • Warehouse Tools — Direct query execution, result preview, connection management

Works with your workspace

Altimate Code Chat works with the workspace selected in the extension's panel: its integrations, knowledge, memory and skills. The agent can query your warehouse, inspect your dbt project, check your Jira tickets and review your GitHub pull requests, all from one conversation.

The selected workspace is used for the chat's skills and memory even if the project is linked to a different workspace in Altimate Code. This needs Altimate Code 0.12.1 or later. See Use a workspace in Altimate Code.

Benchmarks

Altimate Code is #1 on ADE-Bench — the industry benchmark for AI data engineering agents, created by Benn Stancil (founder of Mode) in collaboration with dbt Labs. It evaluates agents on real-world analytics and data engineering tasks using actual dbt projects and databases.

The harness — not the model — is the differentiator. Despite using Sonnet 4.6 (not the most expensive model), Altimate Code outperforms agents running on more capable models, demonstrating that purpose-built tooling and deterministic operations outperform raw model capability alone.

ADE-Bench (DuckDB Local)

Tool Model Score Pass Rate
Altimate Code Sonnet 4.6 32/43 74.4%
Cortex Code CLI Opus 4.6 28/43 65%
dbt Labs Sonnet 4.5 ~25/43 59%
Claude Code (baseline) Sonnet 4.6 ~17/43 40%

Other Benchmarks

Benchmark Result
SQL Anti-Pattern Detection 100% accuracy across 1,077 queries, 19 categories. Zero false positives.
Column-Level Lineage 100% edge match across 500 queries with complex joins, CTEs, and subqueries.
Snowflake Query Optimization (TPC-H) 16.8% average execution speedup (3.6x vs baseline).

Full benchmark details →

LLM Access

Two options for powering the AI chat:

  • BYOK (Bring Your Own Key) — Free and unlimited. Use any of 35+ supported providers (Anthropic, OpenAI, AWS Bedrock, Azure OpenAI, Google, Ollama, and more)
  • Altimate LLM Gateway — Managed LLM access with dynamic routing across Sonnet 4.6, Opus 4.6, GPT-5.4, GPT-5.3, and more. 10M tokens free to get started — no API keys to manage

Standalone Usage

Altimate Code also runs on its own: as a terminal UI, a command-line tool, a web UI, and in CI. See the Altimate Code docs.

Full Documentation