Snowflake, the AI Data Cloud company, announced that Cortex Code CLI, Snowflake’s AI coding agent for local development environments, is expanding beyond Snowflake-native workflows to support any data source across systems, starting with dbt and Apache Airflow (now generally available).
According to the company, with this extended support, developers unlock secure, context-aware AI assistance within their preferred data engineering systems—empowering teams to work with data wherever it lives, and build, manage, and optimize production-grade workflows more efficiently.
By expanding support to dbt and Apache Airflow workflows, Cortex Code CLI helps teams simplify and accelerate development directly within the tools they already use, while maintaining enterprise-grade controls and oversight. This empowers developers to build on their data faster, reduce manual work, and improve code quality to deliver business value from data and AI faster.
“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.”
Snowflake is enabling teams to bring consistent, secure AI-powered development to the tools they already use. This allows organizations to standardize AI across the development lifecycle and improve the efficiency and reliability of production data pipelines, the company said.
With this new release, developers unlock:
- Support for dbt and Apache Airflow workflows: Assisting with model development, debugging, and optimization across data transformation and workflow tools
- Expanded AI model choice: Enabling customers to select leading models, including Claude Opus 4.6 and OpenAI GPT-5.2, to balance quality, latency, and cost based on workload requirements, with continued support for the latest frontier models as they become available
- New administrative controls and governance: Providing enterprise features to manage access, usage, and policy enforcement across teams
To make Cortex Code CLI accessible to any developer and enable teams to realize value regardless of their environment, Snowflake is introducing a new subscription plan that operates independently of Snowflake compute and consumption—lowering the barrier to entry for any developer team.
This marks Snowflake’s first standalone subscription model, offering a seamless, self-service path for developers to begin using Cortex Code CLI, without requiring an existing Snowflake deployment. This approach enables teams to experiment, iterate, and apply AI-powered development across their data workflows with minimal overhead, the company said.
For more information about this news, visit www.snowflake.com.