Datasette Agent releases 0.1a3 with SQL chat, charts, and Fly sandbox plugins

• simonw's launch thread introduced Datasette Agent as a first alpha for conversational Q and A over SQLite databases inside Datasette, with an interactive demo.
• According to the main announcement post, the live demo runs on Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite and can answer questions by writing SQL against example databases, then returning both the result and a Markdown export of the conversation.
• the charts plugin release and the previous charts update show that chart generation shipped alongside the agent, with interactive tooltips, sequential and categorical color handling, and explicit execute-sql permission checks.
• the sprites plugin release adds a separate plugin for running commands in a Fly Sprites sandbox, which turns the assistant into something broader than a SQL chat layer.
• the 0.1a3 release note tightened the inspection loop with “View SQL query” buttons, better truncated-response handling, and cleaner reasoning output.

You can browse the official announcement, read Simon Willison's deeper write-up, and try the live demo. The release also arrived with a charts plugin and a Fly Sprites sandbox plugin, which makes the first alpha feel more like a small agent platform than a single feature.

Datasette Agent is a chat interface for data already stored in Datasette. In the main announcement post, Simon Willison walks through a prompt asking when he most recently saw a pelican; the system answers by generating a SQL query over his blog-backed SQLite data and returning the result.

The first alpha already exposes a few useful inspection hooks. the 0.1a3 release note says the UI now shows “View SQL query” buttons for visible tables and collapsed SQL result tool calls, and keeps table output visible even when the model response itself gets truncated.

The charting layer shipped as its own plugin rather than being folded into the core agent. the charts plugin release says version 0.1a2 added “View SQL query” buttons below rendered charts, which keeps the chart output tied to the query that produced it.

The previous day's earlier charts update filled in more of the mechanics:

• Bar and waffle charts without a color column are shaded by magnitude.
• Text-valued color columns use the observable10 categorical scheme.
• Charts display interactive tooltips.
• The plugin checks execute-sql permission before running its column-name lookup query.
• A waffleY description bug was fixed so the agent can describe that chart type correctly.

That split is the interesting design choice here. The agent writes SQL, while chart rendering and chart-specific permissions live in an extension layer.

A separate plugin called sprites pushes the project past read-only data chat. the sprites plugin release describes datasette-agent-sprites 0.1a0 as a Datasette Agent plugin for running commands in a Fly Sprites sandbox.

That matters because the launch thread framed Datasette Agent as extensible from day one. simonw's launch thread called out plugins for extra tools and features, and the same-day sprites release shows what that means in practice: one plugin adds charts, another adds sandboxed command execution.