Ktx – Open-source executable context layer for data agents
Hi HN, we’re open-sourcing ktx. It’s an executable context layer that makes agents reliable on your data stack.We built it after going through the experience of building production-grade data agents for dozens of companies. If you’ve also tried building them, or simply tried using Claude Code or Codex on your data warehouse, you’ll know that accuracy is the #1 issue. Agents are great at generating valid SQL, but it’s not always correct SQL.To cite a few examples of “agents gone wrong”:- Stale column + hidden business rule: when preparing a board report, a finance analyst asks Claude Code for “ARR by customer segment”, it derives ARR from multiple tables (subscriptions, plans, accounts), then groups by accounts.industry. But CC doesn’t know that this industry column was deprecated a few months prior, or that past board reports excluded paused subscriptions from the ARR calculation- Join fanout: a data analyst at a retailer uses their company’s internal agent to prep a product revenue deck for a QBR. The agent joins orders to order_items, then sums orders.total_amount_cents grouped by order_items.product_id. The SQL runs fine, but each order’s revenue is repeated once per line item, which most people will miss if most orders only have 1 item- Missing attribution logic: a marketing analyst asks Codex “Which campaigns drove the most revenue?” Codex joins marketing_touches to users to orders and groups by utm_campaign. But since each order can have multiple touches before purchase, the same order can be credited to first touch, last touch, every touch, or every campaign the user clicked before buying. If the agent chooses the method that doesn’t match the team’s attribution logic, they’ll make suboptimal decisionsTo solve this at first we gave the agent more context through skills + a wiki-style knowledge base. That gives it some useful extra context but still relies on it writing the SQL without incorrect assumptions.The next solution we explored was implementing a clas
FL score
out of 100
Verdict
high confidence
Competition
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Trend
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An executable context layer that makes AI data agents reliable by encoding business logic, data lineage, and validation rules directly into the agent's decision-making process.
The pain
The gap
Build angle
Strengths
- Solves a real, acute pain point with measurable impact (accuracy in production data agents)
- Founders have deep domain expertise (built this for dozens of companies)
- Open-source positioning builds community and trust in a skeptical market
- Addresses a growing market (data agents are becoming standard tooling)
- Extensible architecture (can integrate with multiple agent frameworks and data stacks)
- Clear competitive moat (encoding organizational semantics is defensible)
Risks
- Adoption friction: requires teams to explicitly encode business logic (overhead vs. perceived benefit)
- Market timing: data agents still early; may not be critical infrastructure yet for most companies
- Competitive threat: major cloud providers (Databricks, Snowflake, dbt) could build similar features natively
- Incomplete pitch: description cuts off mid-sentence; unclear what the actual 'class' solution is
- Monetization unclear: open-source model works for infrastructure, but needs clear path to revenue
- Integration complexity: must work seamlessly across heterogeneous data stacks to be valuable
Fly Labs Method
Is the pain real, is there a gap, is it the right time, can one person build it.
Value Equation
Dream outcome and how likely it feels, against the time and effort it costs.
One-Person Business
Curiosity pull, identity fit, and a path from free value to paid for a solo creator.
Viral Frameworks
Hook strength, shareability, and how cheaply it can be tested.
Builder Lens
Evidence the problem exists, timing, defensibility, and a model that fits on a napkin.
Five lenses, one composite. How scoring works
The angle
No market research recorded for this idea yet.
Semble – Code search for agents that uses 98% fewer tokens than grep
Hey HN! We (Stephan and Thomas) recently open-sourced Semble. We kept running into the same problem while using Claude Code on large codebases: when the agent can't find something directly, it falls back to grep, reading full files or launching subagents. This uses a lot of tokens, and often still misses the relevant code. There are existing tools for this, but they were either too slow to index on demand, needed API keys, or had poor retrieval quality.Semble is our solution for this. It combines static Model2Vec embeddings (using our latest static model: potion-code-16M) with BM25, fused via RRF and reranked with code-aware signals. Everything runs on CPU since there's no transformers involved. On our benchmark of ~1250 query/document pairs across 63 repos and 19 languages, it uses 98% fewer tokens than grep+read and reaches 99% of the retrieval quality of a 137M-parameter code-trained transformer, while being ~200x faster.Main features:- Token-efficient: 98% fewer tokens than grep+read- Fast: ~250ms to index a typical repo on our benchmark, ~1.5ms per query on CPU (very large repos may take longer)- Accurate: 0.854 NDCG@10, 99% of the best transformer setup we tested- MCP server: drop-in for Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, OpenCode- Zero config: no API keys, no GPU, no external servicesInstall in Claude Code with: claude mcp add semble -s user -- uvx --from "semble[mcp]" sembleOr check our README for other installation instructions, benchmarks, and methodology:Semble: https://github.com/MinishLab/sembleBenchmarks: https://github.com/MinishLab/semble/tree/main/benchmarksModel: https://huggingface.co/minishlab/potion-code-16MLet us know if you have any feedback or questions!
AI
Postgres extension for BM25 relevance-ranked full-text search
Last summer we faced a conundrum at my company, Tiger Data, a Postgres cloud vendor whose main business is in timeseries data. We were trying to grow our business towards emerging AI-centric workloads and wanted to provide a state-of-the-art hybrid search stack in Postgres. We'd already built pgvectorscale in house with the goal of scaling semantic search beyond pgvector's main memory limitations. We just needed a scalable ranked keyword search solution too.The problem: core Postgres doesn't provide this; the leading Postgres BM25 extension, ParadeDB, is guarded behind AGPL; developing our own extension appeared daunting. We'd need a small team of sharp engineers and 6-12 months, I figured. And we'd probably still fall short of the performance of a mature system like Parade/Tantivy.Or would we? I'd be experimenting long enough with AI-boosted development at that point to realize that with the latest tools (Claude Code + Opus) and an experienced hand (I've been working in database systems internals for 25 years now), the old time estimates pretty much go out the window.I told our CTO I thought I could solo the project in one quarter. This raised some eyebrows.It did take a little more time than that (two quarters), and we got some real help from the community (amazing!) after open-sourcing the pre-release. But I'm thrilled/exhausted today to share that pg_textsearch v1.0 is freely available via open source (Postgres license), on Tiger Data cloud, and hopefully soon, a hyperscalar near you:https://github.com/timescale/pg_textsearchIn the blog post accompanying the release, I overview the architecture and present benchmark results using MS-MARCO. To my surprise, we were not only able to meet Parade/Tantivy's query performance, but exceed it substantially, measuring a 4.7x advantage on query throughput at scale:https://www.tigerdata.com/blog/pg-textsearch-bm25-fu
AI
Consus (YC F24) – LLM gateway for companies handling sensitive data
Hey Hacker News! I'm Eric, the founder of Consus. We route all AI requests to ITAR restricted and controlled unclassified information (CUI) compliant infrastructure. Consus itself satisfies ITAR restrictions, and we recently completed our FedRAMP equivalency audit against the 410 FedRAMP High controls. FedRAMP High is the U.S. government’s strictest security baseline for cloud services handling sensitive unclassified data. A breach of this data could cause severe or catastrophic harm. Achieving FedRAMP equivalency, or authorization, is required before processing CUI information.Demo: https://youtu.be/6MYxJe6P4oYAerospace and defense is experiencing rapid growth. Unfortunately, most companies are struggling to use AI because of necessary data protections & compliance risk. These companies can move even faster if they could use the AI tools that most other industries take for granted.I spent most of my career prior to Consus in aerospace & defense. I launched national security payloads at SpaceX, and was an early employee at Castelion. I’ve watched first hand how compliance red-tape makes it difficult for companies to adopt new technologies and trust vendors that touch their sensitive data. For example, I worked with a satellite manufacturer that doesn’t allow any AI tools, even for non-sensitive work.Even as AI has become extremely useful over the past 9-12 months, I was surprised by how many aerospace & defense companies refused to touch it. They could see how it could be helpful, but they were scared about model providers training on their data, violating an ITAR rule, or risk losing new business because of a failed cyber assessment. These are all rational fears.There were a lot of ways to solve some/all of these problems, but we focused on building a compliant AI inference layer that can "plug" into any AI tool or workflow. Just as OpenRouter integrates with most tools, Consus can connect to tools like ChatGPT or Clau
AI
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