# Agent-built dashboard

> An agent-built dashboard is one an AI agent authors through an API or MCP server, producing the same versioned, reviewable document a person would write.

Canonical: https://dvt.dev/glossary/agent-built-dashboard/

An agent-built dashboard is a dashboard that an AI agent authors directly, through an API or an MCP server, producing the same versioned and reviewable document a person would write by hand.

The distinction matters because many "AI dashboard" features produce something else: a chat answer, a chart image, or a one-off HTML page. Those look finished but can't be updated, reviewed, or reconnected to live data. An agent-built dashboard is a real dashboard that happens to have an agent as its author.

## How it works in dvt

In dvt, an agent is any non-human caller: Claude Code in a terminal, a scheduled job, or a CI script. An agent connects to the dvt [MCP server](https://dvt.dev/glossary/mcp-model-context-protocol), reads your schema and your team's [skills](https://dvt.dev/glossary/semantic-layer), writes the SQL for each panel, and constructs a [dashboard spec](https://dvt.dev/glossary/dashboard-spec). It [validates](https://dvt.dev/glossary/spec-validation) the spec, runs a [preview](https://dvt.dev/glossary/dashboard-preview) to see the render, and only then applies it.

The result is a live dashboard that runs its queries in your warehouse at view time. Every version records whether a human, an agent, or the system made it, and, for API-key agents, which key it acted through. API safeguards built for agents keep retries and parallel work safe: a repeated request with the same idempotency key returns the original result instead of creating a duplicate, and an update made against a stale version is rejected instead of overwriting someone else's change. The [quickstart](https://dvt.dev/quickstart) builds one from a clean workspace in four prompts.

## Related terms

- [MCP (Model Context Protocol)](https://dvt.dev/glossary/mcp-model-context-protocol)
- [Preview (dry run)](https://dvt.dev/glossary/dashboard-preview)
- [Dashboard version history (revision)](https://dvt.dev/glossary/dashboard-version-history)
- [Dashboards as code, the dvt implementation](https://dvt.dev/solutions/dashboards-as-code)