Launch HN: Nao Labs (YC X25) – Cursor for Data

Summary

Hey HN, we’re Claire and Christophe from nao Labs (https://getnao.io/). We just launched nao, an AI code editor to work with data: a local editor, directly connected with your data warehouse, and powered by an AI copilot with built-in context of your data schema and data-specific tools.See our demo here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmG6X-5ftZUWriting code with LLMs is the new normal in software engineering. But not when it comes to manipulating data. Tools like Cursor don’t interact natively with data warehouses — they autocomplete SQL blindly, not knowing your data schema. Most of us are still juggling multiple tools: writing code in Cursor, checking results in the warehouse console, troubleshooting with an observability tool, and verifying in BI tool no dashboard broke.When you want to write code on data with LLMs, you don’t care much about the code, you care about the data output. You need a tool that helps you write code relevant for your data, lets you visualize its impact on the output, and quality check it for you.Christophe and I have each spent 10 years in data — Christophe was a data engineer and has built data platforms for dozens of orgs, I was head of data and helped data teams building their analytics & data products. We’ve seen how the business asks you to ship data fast, while you’re here wondering if this small line of code will mistakenly multiply the revenue on your CEO dashboard by x5. Which leaves you 2 choices: test extensively and ship slow. Not test and ship fast. That’s why we wanted to create nao: a tool really adapted to our data work, that would allow data teams to ship at business pace.nao is a fork of VS Code, with built-in connectors for BigQuery, Snowflake, and Postgres. We built our own AI copilot and tab system, gave them a RAG of your data warehouse schemas and of your codebase. We added a set of agent tools to query data, compare data, understand data tools like dbt, assess the downstream impact of code in your whole data line...