Show HN: Data Formulator 0.5 – Vibe with your data (Microsoft Research) (data-formulator.ai)

Microsoft Research has released Data Formulator v0.5, an exploratory AI-agent tool that lets users "vibe with data" by turning a wide range of inputs into actionable insights. You can load structured files, connect to databases, and ask agents to extract and clean small ad-hoc data from screenshots or text blocks. The interface emphasizes guided exploration: you pick the analysis paths and the agents carry out extraction, cleaning, basic transformations and visualization — for example, quickly probing consumer price trends from 2005–2025 without building a full pipeline. This matters because it reduces friction in early-stage data wrangling and hypothesis exploration, a pain point for ML practitioners and analysts. By combining OCR/text extraction, database connectivity and agent-driven workflows, Data Formulator accelerates prototype analyses, feature discovery and dataset curation while preserving a human-in-the-loop exploration model. Technically it’s geared toward small-scale, ad-hoc tasks (v0.5 signals early-stage capabilities), so it’s best for rapid iteration rather than production-scale ETL. For the AI/ML community, the tool highlights how agent orchestration and flexible input modalities can streamline exploratory data analysis, improve reproducibility of exploration paths, and lower the barrier to turning messy inputs into model-ready data.