Open Source Data Infrastructure for the Agent Era
Agents write the pipelines; a deterministic engine runs them. Agents query production; the credential, not the prompt, decides what they can see, spend, and do. Starflow and Quack on Demand each work on their own. Both Apache-2.0.
Open-source ELT · Apache-2.0Agents write specs. The engine executes them.
Open-source DuckDB fleet control plane · Apache-2.0Hand your agent the keys: scoped, audited, revocable.
The agentic philosophy
An agent is a new kind of user.
Data platforms were designed for two callers: the application, issuing a fixed, reviewed set of statements, and the analyst, issuing arbitrary ones slowly, with a job title attached. An agent is neither. It writes arbitrary SQL like the analyst, at machine speed like the application, and nobody reads it before it runs.
Machine speed, no review
A single agent turn is a dozen exploratory queries, and nobody is going to read them. Whatever policy you want enforced has to be enforced by the platform, on every statement, every time, without a human in the path.
Prompt injection travels through data
An agent believes what it reads. A value in a row can change what the agent does next. For the first time, the content of your tables can influence the behaviour of the caller reading them.
Credentials outlive agents
Agents are spun up, handed a credential, and discarded. When something goes wrong at 3am, "which agent did this, on whose behalf, and how do I stop it" has to be answerable in seconds.
The policy cannot live in the prompt. It lives in the spec and on the credential.
An agent's instructions are advice. Its grants are the only thing an injected instruction cannot argue with. That single idea shapes both products.
In production at
Open governance
Safe to depend on. Safe to recommend.
Stays Apache-2.0
Both projects are Apache-2.0 and will stay that way. No relicensing to BSL or SSPL. A public, standing commitment.
No telemetry by default
Neither project phones home. No usage tracking, no contact capture, no visibility into your users.
Open contribution
DCO-signed pull requests, transparent review, issues triaged in public on GitHub.
Public roadmap
Direction is decided in the open. Built on neutral, vendor-agnostic standards (Arrow Flight SQL, DuckLake).