The data engineer's Cortex Code cheat sheet

A practical guide to the commands, prompts, patterns, and habits that make Cortex Code useful in real data work. Cortex Code is a data-native coding agent that works directly against your data environment. It sees schemas, roles, grants, tags, lineage, query history, semantic models, and the live shape of the data you are trying not to break. Your SQL lives in a repo. Your dbt models live in a repo. Your DAGs live in a repo. But the work usually fails or succeeds somewhere else: in the data itself, in the state of the platform, and in the operational rules wrapped around it. That is where Cortex Code is useful. It can work against the same environment your code depends on instead of treating the repo as the whole system. This post is a field guide for data engineers who want to use Cortex Code every day. It focuses on the commands, prompts, dbt workflows, Airflow patterns, AGENTS.md, and Skills that are worth keeping close at hand. Start with the right mental model The point of Cortex