Changelog

Love them or hate them, dashboards are the standard for most data sharing, and where a lot of follow-up questions for data begin. Today, we’re releasing Chat with App, a way to explore your Hex apps just by talking to them. We’re also releasing some new ways to bring endorsed data into our agentic experiences to help provide consistent, relevant answers. And as requested by many of you, the launch of TV mode, so you can binge-watch your favorite apps.

💬 Chat with your published apps​

You can now chat directly with your published apps to explore and understand them in an entirely new, more intuitive way. Chat with App makes it easier for anyone to consume and navigate an app, allowing users to ask questions in plain language instead of requiring them to dig through the project's underlying logic or reach out to the data team. The agent can summarize insights, locate specific cells, adjust filters and inputs, and understand the project's underlying logic, all directly within the app experience.

Chat with App is available now for users with Explorer roles on projects that they have “Can explore” permissions to. See our documentation for more details.

Looking ahead, we’re excited to expand the agent’s capabilities to create new logic, allowing it to answer an even broader set of questions and analyses while continuing to take advantage of published app context.

🖊️ Endorsed Mode for Explorer Users​

We are introducing an Endorsed Mode for the Hex Agent in Threads. This provides a streamlined simple approach for data teams to define which data is ready for everyone to use. When in Endorsed Mode, the agent will only use project, table or semantic model context that’s endorsed, i.e. explicitly reviewed and approved by data teams. It’s on by default for Explorer users and an optional mode for Editors.

For editors, toggling on Endorsed Mode makes it easy to ask a question about a different domain that they may not be familiar with. For Explorers, this means they can trust all the data being used has been approved by their data team.

👾 Apply Endorsed Status via Hex’s API​

You can now programmatically apply endorsements to projects, semantic models, and data assets through our API. The new endpoints allow you to bulk-update statuses across your workspace, helping data teams maintain trusted context for the Hex Agent without manual clicks.

📺 TV mode​

TV Mode is designed for displaying Hex apps on monitors, TVs, or any always-on display. When in TV mode, apps automatically refresh whenever a new results from a scheduled run become available. Learn more about details and best practices for TV mode in our help docs.

🛠️ Other improvements​

• The Notebook Agent can update and add cells to a published app: The agent can now configure cells in published apps. A user can say something like "add all the 4 charts and text cells you just created to to published app" - this will use the same logic as if a user clicked the "add to app" button.
• Better query mode performance: Projects utilizing query mode now skip upstream cells that are not included in the app – the fastest query is the one you don’t need to run. As a bonus: if you choose “Query” as the return type for a SQL cell, subsequent SQL cells you create will follow suit.
• Snowflake OAuth token expiration notifications: We built an email notification for expiring personal OAuth tokens. Now, Editors whose tokens are embedded in the notebook or published app are notified prior to their token expiring to refresh it, avoiding annoying situations where a viewer can’t view an app because an Editor forgot to refresh their credentials.
• Responsive chart legend positioning: Chart legends will automatically move to the outside-bottom when the chart is very narrow (unless the legend is set to outside-top). This subtle change has the added benefit of making charts more likely to look classy on a mobile device.

📓 Notebook Agent Act II​

Thousands of teams are using the Notebook Agent every day to tap into the best of agentic capabilities right where they're already doing data work.

Today, we’re announcing new features that make the agent a leap above the rest at tackling advanced analytics: new cell types, chart styling, better context awareness, and organization tools.

The Notebook Agent can now:

• 📊 Style charts to match your preferences
• 🔢 Create input parameters and single value cells
• 🗂️ Auto-organize cells into sections
• 🗑️ Delete redundant cells and unnecessary logic
• 🪲 Debug with graph-aware context

Some of the world's most innovative companies — like Figma, Ramp, and Notion — are using the agent to supercharge analytics.

Want to get started? Check out our Notebook Agent docs.

Read our full announcement to learn more.

Data teams are playing a crucial role in governing the quality of AI responses, just like they did with trusted dashboards in the pre-AI era.

This week’s updates include tools for understanding agent behavior, a cleaner entry point into self-serve analysis on top of semantic models, and more improvements to Threads!

👀 Agent observability in the new Context Studio​

We're bringing observability and context management together in the new Context Studio — giving you the tools to manage what data is trustworthy and how agents should use it.

On Team and Enterprise plans, Admins and Managers can open up the dashboard in the Context Studio to understand how agents are being used, what users are asking, and where performance excels or needs improvement.

With this view, you can:

• Track conversation volume
• Identify your most active users
• Spot patterns in user feedback
• Filter by agent type, workspace role, time range, and more

Admins can also dive into individual conversations to:

• Review the agent's reasoning
• See what context it referenced
• Diagnose where improvements are needed

Managers get access to aggregated metrics but not individual conversations.

When you're ready to make adjustments to the agent’s behavior, you can hop over to the Context sources tab, where we’ve unified settings for workspace rules, data endorsements, and semantic projects in one place.

There is so, so, so much more coming soon here — so share your feedback and stay tuned.

🪟 Views on semantic models​

We’ve introduced views as a new layer on top of semantic models, designed for clarity and readability.

As your data models grow, you can create views in the Modeling Workbench to rename and reorganize dimensions and measures — giving business users a cleaner, more intuitive starting point for self-serve analysis.

Views can help slim down wide tables, simplify complex join trees, or even flatten relations. Now you can scale the complexity of your underlying models, then surface only curated views that are easy for end users to explore and understand.

📁 CSV uploads to Threads​

You can now upload CSVs to Threads, and the Hex Agent can craft queries against the data in the file provided. The agent is also capable of joining the CSV data with existing warehouse data, enabling cross-source insights from a simple file upload.

This is available to users with the Explorer role or higher who have permission to access non-semantic data in Threads. Admins can configure agent data access and data connection defaults in the Threads settings page.

🧵 More Threads improvements​

We’ve made a bunch of additional improvements to Threads!

You can now copy and download charts, pivots, and tables in Threads. Want to add a chart from Threads to your presentation slides? Or import the data in a table into a spreadsheet? You can copy results to your clipboard, or download them as images or CSV files.

When a chart or pivot is built directly on a semantic model, we’ll tag the name of the model directly in the footer of the visualization. This provides a standardized way to check the data source at a glance.

We’ve also made Threads faster at answering simple quick questions. When you ask a question, the agent will gauge the complexity; if it’s deemed an “easy” question, the agent will spend less time thinking and return a quicker response.

Give these improvements a spin by trying our new Threads browser shortcuts! hex.new has always been the shortcut for creating a new project in Hex, and now you can enter threads.new in your browser’s address bar to create a new thread. For an even quicker shortcut, use threads.new?prompt= followed by your question.

📐 User-level agent instructions​

If you want to steer the agent to behave in certain ways — whether it’s the SQL style or just the agent’s tone — you can now add user-level rules files to customize the styling and preferences of the agent’s responses.

From the custom instructions modal, you can also see the agent workspace rules that Admins have added for your organization.

Other improvements​

• Better bulk column editing experience: The Columns menu in the lower right corner of SQL and table cells got a UX refresh and new capabilities! You can now reorder, hide, and pin columns from one tab, and bulk format them in a separate tab.
• Chart upgrades by the Notebook Agent: If you use the Notebook Agent to modify a legacy chart cell, the agent will automatically upgrade the chart cell on your behalf in order to make the changes you ask for.
• Start Threads from workspace search: You can use the keyboard shortcut Cmd+K to open workspace search, type in your question, and start a thread from there.

We’re always working to make Hex better — and that includes investing tender loving care into core workflows like building viz, caching, and publishing apps. This week’s updates are focused on quality-of-life improvements that make it easier to customize charts, get fresh results, and understand performance.

⏱️ New app run and caching UX​

Our new and improved app run settings are now part of the publishing workflow and make it easy to keep apps up to date.

Most of the time, you want apps to reflect the latest data — and now they will. For new projects, the default is to auto-refresh published results: when someone clicks the refresh button, it updates the results for everyone, not just the person who ran it.

Additionally, if results are stale when you open a published app, Hex will kick off a refresh in the background. This means less time waiting for old results to re-run!

For existing apps, Editors can turn on auto-refresh or update results for everyone right from the published app. If you prefer a fixed snapshot instead, you can always restore a previous run from the run log and turn off auto-refresh behavior.

Other improvements include:

• A simpler, clearer app run settings menu
• More consistent display of data age on published apps
• Better handling for errored background runs
• New estimated run time information

Want to dig in? Read the full rundown in our docs.

📊 Chart cell upgrade​

You may have noticed that chart cells recently got an upgrade! All newly-created chart cells come with an updated UI and new capabilities.

Behind the scenes, we've converged our chart cells with Explore, so the experiences are unified across both interfaces. You can now access powerful features in chart cells that were previously exclusive to Explore, including:

• Semantic models support: Chart cells now accept semantic models as a source, allowing you to build visualizations using governed dimensions, measures, and joins — right in your notebook.
• Spreadsheet-style calculations: Define dimensions and aggregate measures directly in chart cells. Aggregative measures (e.g., weighted average, ratio of sums, or any custom aggregation) are computed dynamically based on how your chart data is grouped.
• Top N: It’s now possible to specify the top (or bottom!) n values for a base-axis, color, or facet directly in a chart cell, cutting down the number of steps required to produce these types of visualizations.
• Custom start-of-week settings: Choose Sunday or Monday as the start of the week for charts and pivots. No upstream data wrangling required!
• New and improved config panel: We cleaned up the UI and added clickable pills to change aggregate types and date truncations.
• Drag and drop fields: You can now drag and drop fields into the config panel, or directly into the visualization empty state.
• Responsive layout: The config and data sidebars now auto-collapse based on screen width, so you can keep the Notebook Agent open without crowding the chart editing experience.
• And more here on drilling, viewing underlying data, and filtering on aggregates and measures!

Chart cells created before this update will continue to run, but won’t include the new features listed above. To upgrade, just hover over the “Legacy” tag in the top right corner of an existing chart cell and click “Upgrade.”

🏃 Improved run stats​

We’ve made it easier to understand and troubleshoot performance with better run stats. You can now access reliable information about completed runs in your current session (from the last 48 hours) from the Help menu in the notebook view, or from the Debug View of an app run.

For cells that send queries to the warehouse (e.g., SQL cells and chart or pivot cells using query mode objects), we now show additional details including:

• Whether the query hit the cache
• Time spent querying vs. streaming data
• How much data was streamed

Other improvements​

• Hex Agent in Slack for multi-tenant EU stacks: All multi-tenant customers (including those in the EU) can now install the Hex app in Slack, mention @Hex in any channel, and get answers directly in-thread.
• Stop scheduled runs: It’s now possible to kill actively running scheduled runs from a project’s run log!
• Smarter cell awareness for Notebook Agent: The agent now has context on which cells are published in your app, so you can say things like “review all cells in published app.” The agent also knows which cells you’re focused on or have selected. So when you ask, "Can you move the chart you just created under this cell?" it knows exactly what you mean — no @ mentions needed.
• Notebook Agent in Add Cell Bar & Shortcuts: It’s easier than ever to access the agent when you need it, right from the Add Cell Bar. You can also use keyboard shortcuts: Cmd+G for accessing the agent from the cell bar and Cmd+I for opening the agent sidebar.
• Customize Top N rankings: Instead of being limited to the existing aggregate or measure plotted in your visualization, you can now rank top N by any aggregate or measure.
• New GPU compute profiles: For compute-intensive workflows, we now offer A10G and L4 GPUs — bringing newer architectures, more GPU memory, and better cost-effectiveness than V100s.
• Delete Threads: Clean up your workspace with the option to trash threads from the homepage (via the three-dot menu) or in bulk from the Threads tab. They’ll be permanently deleted after 30 days.
• Clear all chart configs: Sometimes, starting over is the move. Look for the circular arrow icon in the chart config panel to clear all fields and formatting in one go.
• Click to fix “too many data points”: The “too many data points” warning now offers actionable solutions: click buttons to change the time grain, apply an aggregation, or use top N to reduce the number of data points plotted.
• Bug fix for chart loading state: Charts used to show an error icon next to columns while in a loading state. This has been fixed.
• Better query mode performance: SQL cells that return in query mode now run in parallel, leading to faster overall run time.
• @ mention dataframes improvement: You can now @ mention dataframes in the Notebook Agent even if they’re not in kernel memory. This is handy when you revisit a project and haven’t rerun all the cells!

🤖 Hex Agent in Slack & MCP​

Introducing two new ways to tap into Hex's advanced agentic capabilities: a native Slack integration and Model Context Protocol (MCP) support.

We’re bringing trusted context and answers from the Hex Agent directly to where you're already working.

Ask a question by mentioning @Hex in Slack, and the agent gets to work:

• 🔍 Searching your warehouse and semantic models
• 🧠 Writing SQL and analyzing results
• 📊 Responding with any relevant charts and links

Want to get started? Check out our Slack integration docs and MCP server docs.

Read our full announcement to learn more.

Note: The Hex Agent in Slack is available to Explorer+ seats on Team and Enterprise plans for US multi-tenant stacks. Admins can install the Slack integration for their workspace. The MCP server is available to Explorer+ seats on Team and Enterprise plans. Extended AI usage limits are included for free during the early access period.