From RAG to Zero-Code Agents: My Evolution of Building AI Assistants on Snowflake

A walkthrough of three evolutionary stages for building AI assistants on Snowflake, using a retail Sales Assistant as the running example. Stage 1 covers manual RAG implementation with Cortex Search and Streamlit, requiring hands-on Python and SQL. Stage 2 introduces Cortex Agents combining structured and unstructured data via Cortex Analyst and Semantic Views. Stage 3 demonstrates Cortex Code CLI (CoCo), where four plain-English prompts generate all SQL scripts, set up row-level security, create a Semantic View, and deploy a fully functional Snowflake Intelligence agent — with zero code written by the human.