Altimate-code: a new open-source code editor for data engineering based on opencode.
Easter comes early for every developer this year. Altimate-code is an OSS agentic code editor that works in the terminal, based on the admired OpenCode AI editor, with dedicated data engineering features.
The difference to general AI coding agents such as Claude or Codex is that Altimate is focused on SQL and data engineering tasks, with an understanding of the data stack and integration in tooling.
Altimate gives any LLM a deterministic DE intelligence layer, avoiding guessing at schemas.
Some capabilities over a general coding agents:
→SQL anti-pattern detection, confidence-scored
→Column-level lineage, automatic from SQL, any dialect
→Schema-aware autocomplete based on live-indexed warehouse metadata
→Cross-dialect SQL translation for popular DWHs
→FinOps & cost analysis
→dbt integration with parsing manifest, model scaffolding, and lineage
→Observability, with local-first tracing capabilities
Under the hood, altimate-code runs a Rust-native SQL analysis engine (altimate-core) that does AST (Abstract Syntax Tree)-based parsing.
Security is a big part of agents, and altimate-code includes a permission guard system. If you have sensitive PII data, Altimate can run entirely locally, pointing it at DuckDB or hooking it up to Ollama.
PII detection uses regex patterns, and the schema is cached in an embedded SQLite database.
I personally love the three modes, besides `Plan` and `Builder`, it also has an `Analyst` role, where it explores data, selects queries, and makes analyses - like a real analyst.
Simon Späti