Most teams running dbt Core end up assembling the rest of the platform themselves: a cron job here, a Slack webhook there, a spreadsheet tracking which environment points at which schema. It works, until the person who wrote the cron job goes on vacation and a run fails silently for three days.
Forewarden is what we built instead. It runs the dbt Core you already have, the same models, the same tests, the same ref() and Jinja, and adds the parts every team ends up needing anyway: a browser-based Studio for writing and running models, environments and scheduled jobs for deploying them, a lineage graph and catalog for understanding what depends on what, and a semantic layer so a metric means the same thing in every dashboard.
Why now
dbt Core itself hasn't gotten harder to use. Running it reliably across a team, with the right person able to touch production and the wrong person unable to, has. That's the gap we're closing.
What's in this release
Studio ships with a real file explorer, a command bar for build/test/compile/show, and a bottom panel with compiled SQL, query results, lineage, and a compare view. Orchestration covers environments, cron-scheduled jobs, and job chaining. The catalog indexes every model, seed, source, and exposure with health and governance tags pulled from your project's own schema.yml files.
None of this replaces dbt Core. It's the platform around it we kept having to rebuild for every team, so we built it once.