Launch HN: Livedocs (YC W22) – An AI-native notebook for data analysis
arsalanb
4 hours ago
37
15
Hi HN, I'm Arsalan, founder of LiveDocs (https://livedocs.com). We're building an AI-native data workspace that lets teams ask questions of their real data and have the system plan, execute, and maintain the analysis end-to-end.

We previously posted about LiveDocs four years ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30735058). Back then, LiveDocs was a no-code analytics tool for stitching together metrics from tools like Stripe and Google Analytics. It worked for basic reporting, but over time we ran into the same ceiling our users did. Dashboards are fine until the questions get messy, and notebooks slowly turn into hard-to-maintain piles of glue.

Over the last few years, we rebuilt LiveDocs almost entirely around a different idea. Data work should behave like a living system, not a static document or a chat transcript.

Today, LiveDocs is a reactive notebook environment backed by real execution engines. Notebooks are not linear. Each cell participates in a dependency graph, so when data or logic changes, only the affected parts recompute. You can freely mix SQL, Python, charts, tables, and text in the same document and everything stays in sync. Locally we run on DuckDB and Polars, and when you connect a warehouse like Snowflake, BigQuery, or Postgres, queries are pushed down instead of copying data out. Every result is inspectable and reproducible.

On top of this environment sits an AI agent, but it is not "chat with your data." The agent works inside the notebook itself. It can plan multi-step analyses, write and debug SQL or Python, spawn specialized sub-agents for different tasks, run code in a terminal, and browse documentation or the web when it lacks context. Because it operates inside the same execution graph as humans, you can see exactly what it ran, edit it, or take over at any point.

We also support a canvas mode where the agent can build custom UI for your analysis, not just charts. This includes tables with controls, comparisons, and derived views that stay wired to the underlying data. When a notebook is not the right interface, you can publish parts of it as an interactive app. These behave more like lightweight internal tools, similar in spirit to Retool, but backed by the same analysis logic.

Everything in LiveDocs is fully real-time collaborative. Multiple people can edit the same notebook, see results update live, comment inline, and share documents or apps without exposing raw code unless they want to.

Teams use LiveDocs to investigate questions that do not fit cleanly into dashboards, build analyses that evolve over time without constant rewrites, and automate recurring questions without turning them into brittle pipelines.

Pricing is pay-as-you-go, starting at $15 per month, with a free tier so people can try it without talking to us. You'll have to sign up, as it requires us to provision a sandbox for your to run your notebook. Here's a video demo: https://youtu.be/Hl12su9Jn_I

We are still learning where this breaks. Long-running agent workflows on production data surface a lot of sharp edges. We would love feedback from people who have built or lived with analytics systems, notebooks, or "chat with your data" tools and felt their limits. Happy to go deep on technical details and trade notes.

https://livedocs.com
johnsillings4 hours ago
looks great & appreciate that there is an accessible pricing tier. congrats on the launch!
arsalanbjohnsillings4 hours ago
Thanks!
carlyai3 hours ago
congrats guys
arsalanbcarlyai3 hours ago
Thanks!
brettgriffin3 hours ago
That website has an uncanny resemblance to Hex circa 2024.
barrrraldbrettgriffin3 hours ago
I mean the whole product is a Hex clone, literally every feature is something Hex has had for a long time...
basket_horsebarrrrald2 hours ago
Haha, as if Hex isn’t a clone
colordrops3 hours ago
Not a fan of asking to log in to continue after the user has entered data. It's a dark pattern that indicates you are trying to inflate sign up numbers rather than just making your site sticky enough that people want to sign up organically.
arsalanbcolordrops2 hours ago
In our case, in order to run the queries we need to provision a sandbox and connect to your data sources to give meaningful answers, unlike a general purpose chat. We need to have some authentication to prevent abuse here, but the product itself has a free tier so you can use it without paying or needing a card.
ciaranmca arsalanb2 hours ago
Fair enough but the examples shown could surely just display some pre-cooked examples to give a demo of how rhe product works with no real cost to you or barrier to potential users.
arsalanbciaranmca2 hours ago
True! Tried to do that with the video + the example prompts but definitely could use improvement. Thanks for the feedback
colordrops arsalanban hour ago
Even after creating an account, it didn't even finish a single request before it ran out of credits. I'm not going to pay to try it out.
mritchie7122 hours ago
> when you connect a warehouse like Snowflake, BigQuery, or Postgres

I'm curious what others are seeing connecting AI tools to Snowflake. Snowflake charges $3 per compute hour and it's pretty easy for an agent to run dozens of queries asynchronously.

As others have mentioned, if you want a notebook, compare this hard against Hex. It's unclear what LiveDocs would give you over Hex (cheaper maybe?).

ps - if you don't have Snowflake / data warehouse yet, we give you a full data platform (data lake + pipelines + dashboards + agent) at https://www.definite.app/.

arsalanbmritchie7122 hours ago
Livedocs runs locally on your machine or on customer-managed infra, has full terminal access, supports canvas mode for building custom UIs (not just charts), and uses long-running agent workflows with sub-agents coordinating work over time, etc

There is a lot more to data work than just SQL + charts like the tool you mentioned

lacoolj2 hours ago
I've been rolling my own data viz of NFL and NBA stat trends and am curious if this could come up with some better ways to display and analyze the data than I'm currently doing. I would really like to see some solid examples of something similar before investing time (and likely money) into this.

Thanks!