.jpg)
Snowflake has announced significant updates to Cortex Code CLI, its AI-powered coding agent for local development environments. Originally focused on Snowflake-native workflows, Cortex Code CLI now extends support to popular data engineering systems, starting with dbt and Apache Airflow (now generally available). This enables developers to access secure, context-aware AI assistance directly within their preferred tools, regardless of where their data resides, to build, manage, and optimize production-grade data pipelines more efficiently.
Modern data stacks involve multiple systems, leading to complex workflows, frequent pipeline issues, and hidden operational costs that hinder productivity and data trust. By integrating with dbt for data transformation and Apache Airflow for orchestration, Cortex Code CLI simplifies these processes within familiar environments while enforcing enterprise-grade security and oversight. This approach reduces manual effort, improves code quality, and helps teams deliver business value from data and AI more rapidly.
Christian Kleinerman, EVP of Product, Snowflake said, “Developers don’t operate in a single system, and AI coding assistants shouldn’t either. Modern data work spans multiple systems, teams, and workflows — and the tools we build have to reflect that reality. By extending Cortex Code CLI beyond Snowflake, we’re advancing our mission to provide developers with a context-aware agent that understands and works across their entire data ecosystem. By making adoption seamless, we’re meeting developers where they are on their AI journey.”
Spencer Burke, SVP of Growth, Braze said, “Cortex Code is transforming how we approach agentic analytics at Braze. Its native understanding of our datasets, schemas, and columns means our engineers spend less time wrestling with context and more time getting precise, actionable outputs. We're deploying it against more complex data integrations and using it to automate and enrich our insights layer, turning structured analytics into something more dynamic, expressive, and powerful.”
Trent Foley, Chief Technology Officer, evolv Consulting said, “Cortex Code has transformed solution development at evolv Consulting by providing a direct, context-aware connection to the Snowflake ecosystem, allowing our team to interact seamlessly with databases, objects, and git repositories. By leveraging the most advanced models available, such as Opus 4.6, Cortex Code can essentially 'do anything' through its CLI version, from full-featured React app development to complex data engineering tasks. This translated into over 500 hours in time saving – roughly $100,000 in value – in just the first 20 days of adoption.”
The update delivers targeted support for dbt model development, debugging, and optimization, as well as Airflow DAG creation, troubleshooting, and performance tuning. Developers can select from leading AI models to optimize for quality, speed, or cost, with governance controls ensuring secure, compliant usage across teams.
To lower adoption barriers, Snowflake introduces a standalone monthly subscription for Cortex Code CLI that requires no Snowflake compute or account. This self-service model allows any developer or team to start using the tool immediately, experiment with AI-assisted workflows, and drive impact across diverse data environments.
These enhancements build on strong early adoption since the November 2025 launch, positioning Cortex Code CLI as a versatile, developer-first solution for standardizing secure AI across the data engineering lifecycle.
For more details, refer to the official blog post on Cortex Code CLI workflows and the developer guide for getting started.
About Snowflake
Snowflake is the platform for the AI era, making it easy for enterprises to innovate faster and get more value from data. More than 12,600 customers around the globe, including hundreds of the world’s largest companies, use Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud to build, use and share data, apps and AI. With Snowflake, data and AI are transformative for everyone.
TechIntelPro empowers B2B technology decision-makers with the latest industry trends, deep insights, leadership perspectives and actionable intelligence to drive both organizational and professional milestones—and thrive on the tech pulse.