In this special rant episode, Sonny Rivera joins Juan and Tim during a live recording and rant about AI-generated dashboards, semantic layers, and what it takes to trust an answer. The situation: dashboards slop is easy to build which makes foundation matter more, not less. We discussed:
- Building a dashboard was never the hard part. Being able to explain where a number came from is.
- Speed without a governed foundation produces wrong answers faster. As Sonny put it, “fast and wrong is still wrong.”
- Modeling data is really modeling the business. The job has not changed. How it gets done is changing.
- A single source of truth did not hold up. Favors an interoperable set of semantic layers and context, with shared definitions where people actually care.
- Logic written in the moment, in a dashboard or a pipeline, often never makes it back into the semantic layer. Closing that loop is the gap to fix.
- Friction between teams is a sign that a definition matters. Make the differences visible rather than forbidding them.
- Trust is what data leaders can least afford to lose, which is why testing belongs in dashboards too.
- Writing code is no longer the slow part. Product management and testing are becoming the bottlenecks.




