AI featuresOtto

Otto overview

Labs
This feature is in Labs.

Otto, Astronomer’s data engineering agent, is purpose built for the work data engineers do on Apache Airflow. It builds and debugs pipelines, investigates production failures, plans and executes upgrades and migrations, explores and profiles your data, and gets meaningfully better the longer your team uses it.

Otto is grounded in context that no general-purpose agent has access to. Public Airflow knowledge forms the baseline. On top of that sits a proprietary compatibility knowledge base maintained by Astronomer, built from eight years of running Airflow at enterprise scale. The third layer is your team’s own accumulated memory: conventions, corrections, connection configs, and operational history that compound every session.

Key capabilities

Exploration: Query your warehouse, trace lineage, and profile tables from your agent session. Otto answers business questions about your data, checks freshness, and surfaces upstream and downstream dependencies.

Dag Authoring and Debugging: Describe what you need in natural language. Otto writes the Dag, configures connections, triggers a run, and iterates until it works. When something breaks, it pulls task logs, reads the Dag source, inspects variables and connections, and edits the code to fix the failure.

Investigate production failures: When a Dag fails, ask Otto to diagnose it. Otto reads task logs, run history, connections, and Dag source, then works through the diagnosis interactively.

Airflow Upgrades: Otto analyzes your Dag fleet against Astronomer’s proprietary compatibility knowledge base, identifies breaking changes, proposes specific code fixes, and produces a prioritized upgrade plan.

Migrations: Otto helps you move workflows to Airflow on Astro from legacy and third-party orchestration systems.

Otto extends these capabilities through skills it loads on demand. See Skills.

How to access Otto

Otto is available through the astro otto command in the Astro CLI and in the Astro IDE.

  • Astro CLI — Run astro otto from any Astro project folder to launch the interactive terminal user interface (TUI). The command is pre-authenticated with your Astro credentials and pre-configured with skills and proprietary context. See the quickstart.
  • Astro IDE — The AI features in the Astro IDE are powered by Otto. Code generation, Dag authoring, and project-aware suggestions use Otto’s context and skills.

How Otto is versioned

Otto ships as a standalone binary that versions independently of the Astro CLI. The first time you run astro otto, the CLI downloads Otto to ~/.astro/bin/otto. On subsequent launches, the CLI checks for newer releases and applies them automatically before launching the agent.

To opt out of automatic updates, set otto.auto_update to false. The CLI then prints an upgrade hint instead, and you apply updates manually with astro otto update. See Configure the Astro CLI for the config option.

You don’t need to upgrade the Astro CLI to pick up new Otto features or fixes. Check your installed version with astro otto version.

Next steps