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Altimate Code in IDE

What is Altimate Code?

Altimate Code is the open-source data engineering harness with 100+ deterministic tools for building, validating, optimizing, and shipping data products. It brings AI-powered data engineering directly into your IDE through the Datamates extension, or can be used standalone via CLI and TUI.

Getting Started in Your IDE

Install the Datamates Extension

Open Altimate Code Chat

  1. Press Cmd+Shift+P (macOS) or Ctrl+Shift+P (Windows/Linux) to open the command palette
  2. Type Datamates
  3. Select Datamates: Open Altimate Code Chat

This opens the Altimate Code chat panel where you can interact with agents and run data engineering tools.

Features

Agent Modes

Altimate Code provides three agent modes to match your workflow:

Mode Access Level Use Case
Builder Full read/write Scaffolding dbt projects, writing models, generating tests and docs
Analyst Read-only Exploring schemas, running queries, analyzing lineage
Plan Minimal access Planning changes, reviewing impact before execution

100+ Data Engineering Tools

  • SQL Tools — Validation without execution, query optimization, anti-pattern detection, dialect translation, PII scanning
  • dbt Tools — Model generation, test generation, documentation generation, project scaffolding, troubleshooting
  • Lineage Tools — Column-level lineage, impact analysis, downstream dependency tracking
  • Schema Tools — Schema exploration, table/column discovery, metadata indexing
  • FinOps Tools — Cost analysis, warehouse spend reports, optimization recommendations
  • Warehouse Tools — Direct query execution, result preview, connection management

Benchmarks

Altimate Code is #1 on ADE-Bench — the industry benchmark for AI data engineering agents, created by Benn Stancil (founder of Mode) in collaboration with dbt Labs. It evaluates agents on real-world analytics and data engineering tasks using actual dbt projects and databases.

The harness — not the model — is the differentiator. Despite using Sonnet 4.6 (not the most expensive model), Altimate Code outperforms agents running on more capable models, demonstrating that purpose-built tooling and deterministic operations outperform raw model capability alone.

ADE-Bench (DuckDB Local)

Tool Model Score Pass Rate
Altimate Code Sonnet 4.6 32/43 74.4%
Cortex Code CLI Opus 4.6 28/43 65%
dbt Labs Sonnet 4.5 ~25/43 59%
Claude Code (baseline) Sonnet 4.6 ~17/43 40%

Other Benchmarks

Benchmark Result
SQL Anti-Pattern Detection 100% accuracy across 1,077 queries, 19 categories. Zero false positives.
Column-Level Lineage 100% edge match across 500 queries with complex joins, CTEs, and subqueries.
Snowflake Query Optimization (TPC-H) 16.8% average execution speedup (3.6x vs baseline).

Full benchmark details →

LLM Access

Two options for powering the AI chat:

  • BYOK (Bring Your Own Key) — Free and unlimited. Use any of 35+ supported providers (Anthropic, OpenAI, AWS Bedrock, Azure OpenAI, Google, Ollama, and more)
  • Altimate LLM Gateway — Managed LLM access with dynamic routing across Sonnet 4.6, Opus 4.6, GPT-5.4, GPT-5.3, and more. 10M tokens free to get started — no API keys to manage

Standalone Usage

Altimate Code can also be used outside the IDE:

Interface Description
TUI Interactive terminal UI — altimate
CLI Command-line for scripting — altimate run
Web UI Browser-based interface — altimate web
CI/CD Headless mode for pipelines — altimate check
GitHub/GitLab Automated PR review and issue triage

Install standalone:

npm install -g altimate-code

Full Documentation