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AI Copilot

dbt Charts Cloud

This page describes dbt Charts Cloud, the hosted product — these features are not part of the open source dct engine.

Every dbt Charts Cloud project has a chat panel: an AI copilot that can find and describe your boards, run the queries behind them, and build new ones. Project Settings → Agent is where an admin tunes what that copilot knows about this particular project, beyond its built-in dbt Charts knowledge.

If you're reaching your projects from Claude or ChatGPT instead of the in-app chat panel, that's a separate integration: see the Claude & ChatGPT connector.

Project Instructions

If your repository already has an AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md file, or a skills/ folder (also checked at a couple of dot-prefixed locations other coding agents use, such as .agents/skills/), the "Honor this project's AGENTS.md / CLAUDE.md and skills/ folders" checkbox decides whether the Cloud copilot reads them.

It's off by default. A repository that's also used with a local coding agent may ship these files written for that other tool, not for the Cloud copilot, so Cloud never assumes they apply until an admin turns the checkbox on after reviewing the content.

When it's on:

  • Cloud looks for AGENTS.md first, then CLAUDE.md, and uses the first one it finds that isn't empty. If AGENTS.md exists and has content, CLAUDE.md is never read, and the two are never merged.
  • Very long instructions are truncated, with a note telling the copilot it can read the rest of the file on request.
  • A SKILL.md file with valid frontmatter, in its own subfolder of skills/, becomes a skill the copilot can look up the same way it looks up its built-in ones. A plain .md file dropped directly in skills/, or one with missing or invalid frontmatter, is skipped.

Project instructions and skills are treated as context the project's authors wrote, not as rules the copilot must obey. They can't override the copilot's own safety and tool-use policies, and they can't grant the person chatting any capability they don't already have.

Extra skill files

Extra skill files points the copilot at specific files in your repository, one repo-relative path per line, for example:

docs/style-guide.md
glossary/metrics.md

Each path becomes a skill the copilot can look up on demand. Unlike a real skill folder, no special file format is required: point it at an existing style guide or glossary and the copilot reads it as-is. A path that doesn't exist in your repository, or points at an empty file, is skipped. This applies regardless of the checkbox above.

Custom instructions

Custom instructions is free text appended to the copilot's instructions for every conversation in this project, independent of the checkbox above. Use it for guidance that doesn't belong in the repository itself, such as how your team prefers results summarized.