[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Livedocs (YC W22) - An AI-native notebook...
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Launch HN: Livedocs (YC W22) - An AI-native notebook for data
analysis
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.
Author : arsalanb
Score : 39 points
Date : 2026-02-10 18:09 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (livedocs.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (livedocs.com)
| johnsillings wrote:
| looks great & appreciate that there is an accessible pricing
| tier. congrats on the launch!
| arsalanb wrote:
| Thanks!
| carlyai wrote:
| congrats guys
| arsalanb wrote:
| Thanks!
| brettgriffin wrote:
| That website has an uncanny resemblance to Hex circa 2024.
| barrrrald wrote:
| I mean the whole product is a Hex clone, literally every
| feature is something Hex has had for a long time...
| basket_horse wrote:
| Haha, as if Hex isn't a clone
| colordrops wrote:
| 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.
| arsalanb wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| arsalanb wrote:
| True! Tried to do that with the video + the example prompts
| but definitely could use improvement. Thanks for the
| feedback
| colordrops wrote:
| 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.
| mritchie712 wrote:
| > 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/.
| arsalanb wrote:
| 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
| lacoolj wrote:
| 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!
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