Roberto Butinar
Creator of the ADE family — the Agentic Data Engineer. I design data and agentic architectures, launch things that don't exist yet, and write about human and digital minds.
Work
Where most of my time goes: a family of open source products bringing AI agents into analytics engineering across Databricks, Microsoft Fabric, and Power BI — three verbs,understand → operate → consume. In production with enterprise data teams, built on a simple idea: AI as a colleague, not a replacement.
Understand — what exists, and how it’s connected
A cross-platform analytics metadata catalog. It extracts metadata from Databricks, Power BI, and Fabric, builds the cross-platform lineage native tools don't, and exposes it through a web UI and an MCP server for AI agents.
Open sourceGitHub →Operate — one source of truth, safe promotion
An operations framework for analytics teams across Databricks, Fabric, and Power BI. One source of truth, multi-environment promotion, and diff-before-push safety — designed for humans and AI agents to operate together.
Open sourceGitHub →Consume — the certified answer, with the proof
A governed, cross-tool consumption layer over an existing BI estate (Power BI, Databricks, legacy BI). It doesn't hand you a plausible answer — it takes you to the certified report, with the proof.
LiveVisit →Ventures
Different domains, different stages — some further along than others, same itch: building things that don't exist yet.
Dungeons & Astronauts · concept
A themed-restaurant concept I'm shaping — beautiful, immersive, magical, retrofuturistic. A place that doesn't exist yet and that I'd want to inhabit. Smash burgers, potions, side quests.
Peek →An idea I’m validating
Free your home from the things you don’t need right now but might need later — or haven’t decided about yet. Room to make space for something else.
Discover →Writing & ideas
The human/digital mirror — a book, an earlier collection, and short essays on what it means to build minds that respond.
Book — Italian
A journey through neurobiology, philosophy of mind, and artificial intelligence. What does it mean to build minds that respond — and what does that reveal about our own?
AvailableRead more →Exploring the intersections of human and digital intelligence — a collection of reflections on AI, neurobiology, and philosophy of mind (2024). The seed that grew into Qualcuno Risponde.
Read →The emotions were already there
I wrote that AIs feel nothing. Then Anthropic published a paper finding 171 distinct emotion representations in Claude. Here's what that means — and what it connects to.
Susan Calvin was right
Asimov's robopsychologist spent her career diagnosing mysterious deviations in minds governed by rigid rules. Turns out that's a real job now.
Drop me a line if any of this interests you — as a customer, collaborator, or simply curious.
YouTube:The Agentic Data Engineer(work) ·Human Digital Minds(writing)