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Comment by numlocked | Hacker News Reader

We are heavy Hex users at OpenRouter. I was skeptical that it would replace "core" reporting tools like Looker, but the efficacy of the Hex agent has made it our go-to for just about all of our analytics, and allowed us to get incredibly far with a single (very good) person on the data team.

We can make completely reproducible reporting when we need it (for e.g. our weekly business reviews), while the agent can answer all of the ad-hoc stuff that would normally be done by a small army of analysts scurrying around.

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OpenRouter only having 1 person in the data team is completely nuts. A canary in the coal mine for whats to come in the whole data space :|

1 or 2 exceptional ICs, a clean semantic layer and agents is "all you need".

RIP to the sexiest job of the 21st century ...

As far as I know OpenRouter has <100 employees, maybe even <50.

1-2% headcount on data is below average for a tech company but not unbelievable either.

It is true you can get a lot further than before with "just" a clean semantic layer though!

Far less promising companies with zero profits often have thousands more employees…

The secret here is that building the semantic layer is a ton of work, predominantly done by data people.

Writing has been on the wall since before LLMs took over. Companies invested an incredible amount of money into "big data" over the past 15 years, and the returns are still nowhere to be seen. Data science and data engineering departments have been among the most impacted in all the layoff waves since covid.

It was always a pointless job. I’d watch data people manually put together PowerPoints by hand when it’s the same powerpoint every week and could be entirely automatic.

But they don’t, because they want to look busy. And it’s not like they actually understand the data anyway, because they’ve never worked in the area the data comes from.

thanks for sharing.

any other tools that are also key to your stack that you wouldn't mind sharing, so others can learn from and try out?

Love to learn more how to become a very good data person, mind sharing more about it.

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