The semantic layer existed because humans could not read SQL. Agents can. Jacopo Tagliabue (CTO, Bauplan) makes a contrarian case: most of what a semantic layer provides for agents already lives in well-written pipeline code- decorators, type hints, Pydantic classes, and docstrings, persisted next to data in Iceberg.
00:00 - Introduction
07:27 - What the semantic layer is and why it exists
14:17 - The contrarian thesis: LLMs and open formats change the equation
17:21 - Example: revenue by country, in code
40:25 - Q&A