dbt Testing Strategies Before Feeding Data to LLMs: Preventing Garbage-In, Garbage-Out
· 5 min read
An AI agent is only as reliable as the data it reasons from. Feed it nulls, duplicates, or stale data and it will produce confident, coherent, and wrong answers — often without any obvious signal that something is off. The LLM doesn't know what it doesn't know.
dbt's testing framework is the right place to enforce data quality before data reaches your agents. This post covers a layered testing strategy that catches the most common failure modes before they become AI failures.