Snowflake (NYSE: SNOW), the company behind the AI Data Cloud, announced today that Cortex Code CLI, Snowflake’s AI coding agent for local developer environments, is expanding beyond Snowflake-based workflows to support data sources across different systems, beginning with dbt and Apache Airflow® 1 (now generally available). With this expanded support, developers gain secure, context-aware AI assistance in their preferred data engineering tools—enabling teams to work with data wherever it lives and to build, manage, and optimize production-grade workflows more efficiently.
The latest Cortex Code CLI updates add support for popular data systems dbt and Apache Airflow®.
Modern data stacks span multiple systems, making data management workflows increasingly complex and resource intensive. When pipelines fail, hidden costs rise—productivity drops, operational friction grows, and trust in data erodes—slowing the delivery of business value. By extending support to dbt and Apache Airflow workflows, Cortex Code CLI helps teams simplify and accelerate development directly within the tools they already use while preserving enterprise-grade controls and governance. Developers can move faster, reduce manual work, and improve code quality to deliver data and AI-driven value more quickly.
“Developers don’t work in a single system, and AI coding assistants shouldn’t either,” said Christian Kleinerman, Chief Product Officer at Snowflake. “Modern data work spans systems, teams, and workflows—the tools we build must reflect that reality. Expanding Cortex Code CLI beyond Snowflake furthers our mission to provide developers with a context-aware agent that understands and operates across their entire data ecosystem. By making adoption seamless, we meet developers where they are on their AI journey.”
“Cortex Code is changing how we approach agent-driven analytics at Braze,” said Spencer Burke, SVP of Growth at Braze. “Its built-in understanding of our datasets, schemas, and columns lets our engineers spend less time wrestling with context and more time getting accurate, actionable results. We’re deploying it against more complex data integrations and using it to automate and enrich our insights layer, turning structured analysis into something more dynamic, expressive, and powerful.”
Extending AI-driven development across data engineering systems to boost productivity
Since the launch of Cortex Code in November 2025, Snowflake has seen strong adoption with over 4,400 new users—highlighting growing demand for developer-focused tools that simplify and accelerate engineering work. Teams are quickly embracing Cortex Code to move faster with greater confidence and to convert complex multi-system workflows into production-ready outcomes.
Snowflake enables teams to deliver consistent, secure AI-driven development within the tools they already use. This allows organizations to standardize AI across the development lifecycle and improve the efficiency and reliability of production data pipelines.
With this release, developers gain:
- Support for dbt and Apache Airflow workflows: Assistance for model development, debugging, and optimization for data transformation and orchestration tools
- Expanded choice of AI models: Customers can select leading models, including Claude Opus 4.6 and OpenAI GPT-5.2, to balance quality, latency, and cost based on workload needs, with continued support for new frontier models as they become available
- New administrative controls and governance: Enterprise features to manage access, usage, and policy enforcement across teams
“Cortex Code has transformed solution development at evolv Consulting by providing a direct, context-aware connection to Snowflake’s ecosystem, allowing our team to interact seamlessly with databases, objects, and git repositories,” said Trent Foley, Chief Technology Officer at evolv Consulting. “Leveraging the most advanced models available, like Opus 4.6, Cortex Code’s CLI can effectively ‘do anything’—from full React app development to complex data engineering tasks. That resulted in over 500 hours saved—roughly $100,000 in value—within the first 20 days after deployment.”
Making Cortex Code CLI available to developers in any environment
To make Cortex Code CLI broadly accessible and enable teams to realize value regardless of environment, Snowflake is introducing a new subscription plan that operates independently of Snowflake’s compute and consumption tiers—lowering the barrier to entry for development teams. This is Snowflake’s first standalone subscription model and provides a seamless self-service path for developers to start using Cortex Code CLI without requiring an existing Snowflake deployment. This approach lets teams experiment, iterate, and apply AI-driven development across their data flows with minimal overhead.