Snowflake, the company behind the AI Data Cloud, has announced a major expansion of its Cortex Code CLI, its AI-powered coding agent built for local development environments. Notably, the company is extending the tool beyond Snowflake-native workflows to support external data systems, starting with dbt and Apache Airflow, which are now generally available.
With this move, Snowflake is positioning Cortex Code CLI as a cross-system AI assistant that works wherever data resides. As modern data stacks increasingly span multiple platforms, teams often struggle with fragmented workflows and rising operational complexity. Consequently, when pipelines fail, organizations face mounting hidden costs, productivity slowdowns, and reduced confidence in their data.
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To address these challenges, Snowflake has expanded Cortex Code CLI to operate seamlessly within dbt and Apache Airflow environments. As a result, developers can now build, debug, and optimize workflows directly inside the tools they already use. At the same time, enterprises retain governance controls, secure access management, and oversight capabilities. This combination enables teams to reduce manual tasks, enhance code quality, and accelerate the delivery of production-ready data pipelines.
“Developers don’t operate in a single system, and AI coding assistants shouldn’t either,” said Christian Kleinerman, EVP of Product, Snowflake. “Modern data work spans multiple systems, teams, and workflows and the tools we build have to reflect that reality. By extending Cortex Code CLI beyond Snowflake, we’re advancing our mission to provide developers with a context-aware agent that understands and works across their entire data ecosystem. By making adoption seamless, we’re meeting developers where they are on their AI journey.”
Industry users are already reporting tangible impact.
“Cortex Code is transforming how we approach agentic analytics at Braze,” said Spencer Burke, SVP of Growth, Braze. “Its native understanding of our datasets, schemas, and columns means our engineers spend less time wrestling with context and more time getting precise, actionable outputs. We’re deploying it against more complex data integrations and using it to automate and enrich our insights layer, turning structured analytics into something more dynamic, expressive, and powerful.”
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Since launching Cortex Code in November 2025, Snowflake has attracted more than 4,400 new users. This rapid adoption underscores the growing demand for developer-first AI tools that simplify complex, multi-system workflows. Moreover, the latest release introduces expanded AI model options, including Claude Opus 4.6 and OpenAI GPT-5.2, allowing customers to balance performance, latency, and cost based on workload needs. Snowflake has also added new administrative controls to strengthen governance, access management, and usage monitoring across teams.
“Cortex Code has transformed solution development at evolv Consulting by providing a direct, context-aware connection to the Snowflake ecosystem, allowing our team to interact seamlessly with databases, objects, and git repositories,” said Trent Foley, Chief Technology Officer, evolv Consulting. “By leveraging the most advanced models available, such as Opus 4.6, Cortex Code can essentially ‘do anything’ through its CLI version, from full-featured React app development to complex data engineering tasks. This translated into over 500 hours in time saving – roughly $100,000 in value – in just the first 20 days of adoption.”
In addition, Snowflake is introducing its first standalone subscription plan for Cortex Code CLI. Unlike traditional Snowflake deployments, this new model operates independently of Snowflake compute and consumption. Therefore, any developer team can adopt the tool without requiring an existing Snowflake environment. Ultimately, this lowers barriers to entry and enables organizations to experiment, iterate, and scale AI-powered development across diverse data ecosystems with minimal overhead.
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