The AI assistant
The assistant is not a chat beside the platform but an agent inside it. It uses the same paths as the interface — with the same rights and the same logging.
On this page
It acts with your rights
The agent holds no privileged account. What it queries, it queries with the token exchanged for you. A row a policy hides from you is hidden from it as well — and it therefore cannot mention that row in an answer.
Gate, audit, run
The agent does not call a database directly; it works through a fixed set of curated tools. Each of them passes the same three-step chain:
Gate
May this user call this tool with these arguments? The check is fail-closed: whatever is not explicitly allowed is refused.
Audit
The call is written into the hash chain before it runs — not after.
Run
Only now does the tool execute, under the delegated token.
Mutating steps ask first
Anything that creates, changes or deletes is surfaced for confirmation first. The agent acts once somebody agrees — not because it thinks it should.
What it is good for
- Looking at and analysing data — walking the catalog, building queries, explaining results.
- Proposing and creating the semantic model: it can inspect a table and derive metrics and views from it. Write-gated and administrators only.
- Operating dashboards — viewing, changing, renaming and deleting tiles.
The language model is swappable
No model ships with the platform; administrators choose the backend. Three routes are open: a key for a hosted provider, a self-hosted model behind an OpenAI-compatible address, or letting individual users sign in with their own Claude account. Details under Configuring the AI backend.
Only the chat speaks outward
And only with a hosted provider. With a self-hosted model, not a word leaves the installation.
lavalake as an MCP server
The reverse direction works too: the platform exposes a selection of read-only tools over the Model Context Protocol so that other AI systems can query the lakehouse. Enablement is fail-closed — a tool is reachable only once it has been explicitly switched on.
Applies to: This page describes lavalake 0.16.0. Product and documentation live in separate repositories — when in doubt, what the console shows is authoritative.
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