Show HN: Briefer – Multiplayer notebooks with schedules, SQL, and built-in LLMs

Is your PM technical?

I have a question I ask people I interview now for data science jobs -- can you run a python hello world from the command line? A non-trivial number of people who say they have multiple years of data science + python experience do not know how to do this!

People need to know how to write functions to write professional software, not just put a soup together of notebook cells.

Disagree with Matt even that they won't like this code -- it is just learning basic stuff like file structure and python environments, see how I approach it in the first two chapters running stuff from REPL here https://crimede-coder.com/blogposts/2023/EarlyReleasePython.

Btw, when I click the Amazon link in your bio it goes here:

https://www.amazon.com/hapi-js-Action-Matt-Harrison-ebook/dp...

And it's some random kindle book about some JavaScript library I never heard of.

But I'm pretty sure you are the Matt Harrison I follow on twitter:

https://x.com/__mharrison__

I strongly agree with your comment. I'm a software engineer and I was surprised to find out about the practices of some data teams.

I do believe we should bring software best practices to the data world, not only regarding code design but regarding infrastructure and tooling too (like versioning everything).

Still, I get where they're coming from. A software engineer would also be frustrated if they had to learn everything a data scientist knows (probably even more).

I think the tooling itself can solve this issue by encouraging best practices though.

Thanks for asking!

The products are similar in the sense that both are cloud-based notebooks, but we have different approaches to building them.

I answered a question about Hex below, and the general outline applies here. To summarize:

1. We want to go beyond just notebooks. We want to centralize all data tasks in Briefer, including traditional BI so we’re building specific features for that, like dashboarding and everything that comes with it.

2. We’ll enable people to use their own compute for the notebooks.

3. We want to allow people to manage notebooks, dashboards, and apps “as code” so they can version it whenever necessary.

We unfortunately didn’t finish items 2 and 3 yet because we’ve only started working on Briefer six months ago, but we’re fast and we’ll get there soon.

Also, we’re working on something new that will make the distinction clearer, but I can’t talk about that yet.

That's a feature request we get every now and then. It's coming soon!

I haven't yet had time to implement it because I was working on the core pieces of functionality, but as a dark mode user I want to get to that soon.

Thanks for the positive feedback.

It's not as much of a direct competitor because Count's approach seems more like "Miro for Data" while ours is more like "Notion for Data".

Still, I do think people could end up comparing both our tool and theirs when evaluating a few types use cases.

The data itself is indeed a problem. More than that, I'd add that the very definition of what's being measured or calculated is an even bigger problem (i.e. what's an active user?)

Still, I think that we can get to a place where everyone uses the same tool to collaborate on data matters, like a "Retool for data/BI". At a high-level, that's the direction we're going, and we're starting with notebooks and dashboards.

Also, the "Get started" button on the free plan goes to book a call instead of signing up.

I like it.

Agreed. Everything else is very nice

Hey Trevor, that's a great question!

On a surface level, we're doing a lot of work on UX. We intend the UI to be more presentable and easier to navigate through so that technical users find it easier to use while non-technical users find it more approachable and can more easily find what they're looking for.

In terms of capabilities:

1. We want to merge all data-related features in one place, including BI. That's why you can create and publish dashboards too. It's also why we've been putting a lot of effort into making the no-code visualizations flexible and powerful.

2. You'll eventually be able to connect your own computer to Briefer. That way, you can use your AWS/Azure/GCP credits and your own GPUs if you have already paid for them.

3. There will be a way for you to manage notebooks and dashboards as code if you want to. We love the idea of versioning your notebooks, internal data apps, and dashboards, but we think current tools can't do it well.

There's also a huge change coming up in about 2 months. It'll make it really clear how we're different from Hex, but unfortunately I can't talk about that yet!

Hey Suchintan! Great to see you here - we're happy that you've been using Briefer!

Regarding your questions:

1. Briefer is definitely a Jupyter replacement and it can be a Metabase replacement. Most of our users with BI use cases start using Briefer for more advanced types of dashboards and analyses, and they eventually end up slowly replacing their traditional BI with Briefer.

2. That's indeed something that's crossed our minds before. We're not open-sourcing it right now though.

Yes, that's a great question.

We do a lot of things to keep the credentials safe that go beyond just putting everything behind a VPN and setting pods' SECCOMP profiles. That obviously includes encrypting credentials and putting in place tight access controls both to the credentials themselves and the encryption keys.

Also, even though we're not SOC2 compliant (yet) we do run pen tests.

I really appreciate the positive feedback, I'm glad you like the launch.

Regarding self-hosting: Yes, we have discussed that with other potential customers.

If you're interested in a self-hosted offering, please reach out to me at lucas.costa [at] briefer [dot] cloud and I'll help you out there and walk you through what that would look like.

Unfortunately, that's not possible yet. We want to fix that, but very few people use public pages, and even fewer use public dashboards, so we didn't prioritize it.

Thanks for reporting it, it helps us understand what people want!

It's up to you.

So far, there seems to be an even split between the people that always go for the AI and the people that write everything themselves.

Personally, I use the AI whenever I need to write anything other than `SELECT * FROM xyz WHERE`. It just saves me so much time.

It's funny you say that - we had users who simply wanted to run queries and didn't have direct access to a database, so they just asked someone from the technical team to connect their DB to Briefer and then they started querying from there because it's more convenient.

After a while they realized there were a bunch of other cool features and started engaging with those too.

Thanks!

We do not support running notebooks locally right now, but offline access is coming soon.

With regards to running code on high-end GPUs: currently, we manually allocate GPUs to our customers when they need that. Still, we do want to eventually allow people to connect to their cloud providers to spin-up compute instances there.

Hey Jay, thanks for the question!

In Briefer you can hide the blocks you don't want others to see, like the ones in which you're just manipulating data. Instead, you can show only the results so that your analysis is really easy to understand.

You can also display your analyses as dashboards or build small data apps with inputs and dropdowns for them to use.

Still, I wouldn't recommend completely non-technical users to create content within Briefer - only to read it and interact with the apps/dashboards there.

Thanks for asking. I answered that question below.

You can see the response here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41055495

Hey Fernando, thanks for the enthusiastic comment.

Would love to hear more about what you mean regarding the CLI and connectors. Can you give me a few examples of what these would look like?

By the way, I didn't know Calca. Looks neat, I'll definitely have a look.

I'm glad you're excited about Briefer!

We've already seen hacky solutions starting to be replaced and that makes me quite happy.

Thanks for reporting this issue. I’ll look into that right now.

Thanks for the comment!

That’s possible. For it to work you’d have to create a “dropdown block” and select the “dynamic” option in its settings. Then, you will be able to select a dataframe and the column from that dataframe you want to use as dropdown options.

By the way, every query automatically becomes a dataframe so you can use either a query result’s column or a raw Python dataframe.

As a side note, I’m putting together detailed product documentation this week too and I’ll make sure to include it there.

At this stage, we're putting a lot of effort into "selling" the (free) community tier because (1) that leads to great feedback and (2) the vast majority of paying customers come from the free tier anyway.

We want the free tier to be so good it becomes the new notebook standard - and then we'll only charge for features that companies need, like Slack integrations or a large number of seats.

Regarding AI, we currently go with GPT-4o by default, but you can change it on the settings panel. Currently, we have only enabled GPT-4o and Mistral though, but we want to add more - it's just not our priority right now because the OpenAI model is just incredibly good.