Quill — Open-source GenBI: generative BI for AI agents.

Your agents generate, deploy, and govern dashboards from any database, grounded in a context layer they can actually trust.

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📣 2026-05-07: Quill Engine has merged into this repo under core/. The previous omen18/quillai-engine repo is archived. The previous Quill GenBI app (the Docker-based chat-first BI product) is preserved on the legacy/v1 branch (tag v1-final) and is now Quill GenBI Classic; see A note on the "GenBI" name below. Read the announcement →

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What Quill is

Quill is the open-source GenBI engine: it lets AI agents generate, deploy, and govern business intelligence, from a SQL answer to a shareable dashboard, across 22+ data sources.

What makes the output trustworthy is the layer underneath: an open context layer that gives agents what schemas don't. That means business semantics, approved definitions, examples, memory, and governance, plus the unstructured company knowledge that lives in your docs, wikis, and chat threads. Generative BI is only as good as the context it stands on, and Quill is that context, made reviewable and reusable by every agent you already run.

GenBI in three beats: Generate · Deploy · Know

• Generate. Your agent turns a business question into governed SQL and charts. Schema-aware retrieval, MDL planning, dry-plan validation, and structured errors keep it correct instead of confidently wrong.
• Deploy. Turn any answer into a shareable, browser-side dashboard powered by quill-core-wasm and ship it to your own Vercel or Cloudflare Pages account with one command.
• Know. The knowledge that makes all of this correct lives in versionable, evidence-linked files: semantic models (MDL), company definitions (instructions.md), and a memory of what worked. Reviewable. Git-friendly. Never locked inside someone else's UI.

Why agent builders pick Quill

• Generative BI, end to end. Not just text-to-SQL. Generate the answer, deploy the dashboard, share the URL, all driven by the agents you already use.
• Knowledge management built in. Business meaning, approved definitions, and proven examples are captured as reviewable, version-controlled context, not buried in prompts.
• Open by default. Open-sourced core, SDK, and skills under the Apache-2.0 license.
• Correctness as primitives. Rich schema retrieval, dry-plan validation, structured errors with hints, value profiling, eval runner. The agent orchestrates; the trace lives in its reasoning.
• Sits on top of your existing stack. Warehouse, transformation pipelines, your existing semantic layer. Not another tool to maintain.

How Quill compares

	A raw LLM agent	A traditional BI tool	A bare semantic layer	Quill
Writes SQL for you	✅ (often wrong)	❌	❌	✅ governed
Knows your business definitions	❌	partial, in-tool	✅ (schema only)	✅ + non-schema knowledge
Generates & deploys dashboards	❌	✅ (manual, in-tool)	❌	✅ agent-driven
Works through your agents (Claude Code, Cursor, MCP…)	✅	❌	❌	✅
Open, reviewable, Git-friendly context	❌	❌	partial	✅
Governed execution across 22+ sources	❌	per-connector	✅ (definitions only)	✅

Quill is for you if…

• You want AI agents to produce trustworthy BI, answers and dashboards, not just plausible SQL.
• Your business logic (definitions, enums, units, approved joins) lives outside the database and your agents keep getting it wrong.
• You want context that's open, reviewable, and version-controlled, usable by every agent and person, not gated behind one vendor's UI.

Skip Quill if you only need a one-off chart from a single CSV, or you're happy letting an agent guess at SQL with no governance.

Quickstart

Quill is agent-driven by design: install the CLI, install a one-file discovery stub for your AI client, then let your AI agent drive the rest. Workflow guides live inside the CLI itself and are served on demand, so content always matches the installed version.

1. Install the CLI

pip install quill                      # core (DuckDB included)
pip install "quill[postgres,memory]"   # add per-datasource and memory extras as needed

Tip for users in mainland China: If pip install is slow or fails, use the Tsinghua mirror:

pip install quill -i https://pypi.tuna.tsinghua.edu.cn/simple

If HuggingFace model downloads time out, add export HF_ENDPOINT=https://hf-mirror.com before running the CLI.

2. Install the discovery stub for your AI client

npx skills add omen18/QuillAI            # auto-detects Claude Code, Cursor, Cline, Codex, …

The stub is ~50 lines. It teaches your agent to fetch workflow guides via quill skills get <name> and shaped prompts via quill ask "<question>" --guided|--direct, and everything else lives in the CLI.

3. Ask your agent to set things up

Open your agent in a project directory and say something like:

"Use Quill to set up my Postgres database."

The agent runs quill skills get onboarding, follows the guide step-by-step, checks your environment, creates a connection profile, scaffolds the project, and runs a first query.

4. (Optional) Enrich the project: the Know beat

Once onboarding finishes, ask:

"Enrich my Quill project with the business context in raw/."

The agent runs quill skills get enrich-context and follows the guide in grill mode (one question at a time) or auto-pilot mode (agent reads <project>/raw/ and proposes). Both modes write to MDL, instructions, queries, and memory, all reviewable, all Git-friendly.

5. Ask questions: the Generate beat

"Who are our top 10 customers by sales this quarter?"

Your agent fetches MDL context, recalls similar past queries, writes governed SQL, and executes via quill query.

6. Build & deploy a dashboard: the Deploy beat

"Turn that into an interactive dashboard I can filter and share, and deploy it to Vercel."

The agent runs quill skills get genbi, builds a browser-side GenBI app from your project's context, previews it locally, and ships it to your own Vercel or Cloudflare Pages account, returning a live, shareable URL. See the Build & deploy a GenBI app guide.

Want to try it without your own database? Ask your agent to use the bundled jaffle_shop sample dataset. Same flow, querying a real warehouse end-to-end in a couple of minutes.

Two beats first, then the third

# Day 1 (agent-driven)
quill skills get onboarding         # workflow guide: set up project + first query  (Generate)
quill skills get enrich-context     # workflow guide: add business context           (Know)
quill skills get genbi              # workflow guide: build & deploy a dashboard      (Deploy)

# Day-to-day
quill query --sql '...'             # query through the MDL semantic layer
quill ask "<question>" --guided     # wrap a question for a weaker agent
quill ask "<question>" --direct     # wrap a question for a stronger agent

Fast at first. Deep when you need it. Always reviewable and Git-friendly.

What's Included

• Modeling Definition Language (MDL): models, columns, relationships, views, cubes, metrics, row-level / column-level access control (RLAC / CLAC)
• Engine: Apache DataFusion based, 22+ data sources
• GenBI dashboards: agent-built, browser-side apps powered by quill-core-wasm, deployable to Vercel / Cloudflare Pages
• Knowledge & memory: business meaning in version-controlled instructions.md and queries.yml, plus a local LanceDB memory index (hybrid retrieval) for recall
• Agent SDK: quill-langchain (LangChain / LangGraph), quill-pydantic; reference Python integration for other stacks
• Governed execution primitives: functions, dry-plan, row limits, access control

What's next

• End-to-end correctness primitives: value profiling, rich retrieval, structured errors, golden eval runner
• Agent-native distribution: first-class SDKs across major agent frameworks; see GitHub Discussions for what's prioritized next
• Full governed execution: audit logs, rate limits, approval workflow, data-flow inspector

Full roadmap and design notes: see the introduction.

A note on the "GenBI" name

"GenBI" now refers to this open-source generative-BI capability: agents that generate governed answers and deploy dashboards on top of Quill's context layer. The earlier Quill GenBI app, the Docker-based chat-first BI product, is now Quill GenBI Classic, preserved on the legacy/v1 branch (no new features or security fixes). For a maintained, hosted version of that classic experience, see Quill Commercial.

Documentation

• Quickstart: from skill install to first answer
• Build & deploy a GenBI app: generate a dashboard and ship it
• Concepts: what context is, what MDL is, how memory works
• Connect a database: Postgres, BigQuery, Snowflake, DuckDB, and more
• Agent SDKs: what's shipping today, what's next

Community

• 💬 Discord: chat with the team and other builders
• 🐙 GitHub Discussions: design conversations, RFCs, longer threads
• 🐦 Twitter / X: release notes and short updates
• 🗞 Blog: vision, post-mortems, deep dives

Contributing

We build in the open. Issues, PRs, connector contributions, SDK integrations, docs fixes are all welcome.

• Contributor guide
• Connector ecosystem program: three-tier ownership (official, community-blessed, community-owned)
• Architecture map: find the right place to land your change
• Looking for somewhere to start? Try the good first issue label.

Project structure (click to expand)

core/
  quill-core/         Rust semantic engine (Apache DataFusion)
  quill-core-base/    Shared manifest types + MDL builder
  quill-core-py/      Python bindings (PyPI: quill-core)
  quill-core-wasm/    WebAssembly build (npm: quill-core-wasm)
  quill/              Python SDK and CLI (PyPI: quill)
  quill-mdl/          MDL JSON schema
sdk/
  quill-langchain/    Reference agent SDK integration
skills/              Agent skills for context authoring
docs/                Module documentation
examples/            Example projects

Contributors

License

Yash Raj Sharan

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Come build open GenBI with us.

If Quill helps you, drop a ⭐, it genuinely helps us grow!

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