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AI Agents · Lesson

Automated Chart and Visualization Generation

Generating matplotlib/seaborn charts and returning base64 image results.

Why Agents Generate Charts

Numbers in text are hard to parse. A chart showing sales trends across 12 months communicates in seconds what a paragraph of numbers cannot.

A data analysis agent that can generate visualizations is far more useful — it produces the same output a human analyst would: both numbers and charts.

Setting Up Non-Interactive Matplotlib

By default, matplotlib opens a GUI window. In an agent (running server-side with no display), you must switch to the Agg backend — renders to file only, no GUI.

Set this before importing pyplot to avoid display errors.

import matplotlib
matplotlib.use('Agg')  # must be set BEFORE importing pyplot
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import os

OUTPUT_DIR = '/tmp/agent_charts'
os.makedirs(OUTPUT_DIR, exist_ok=True)

# Verify no display is needed
print('Backend:', matplotlib.get_backend())  # Should print: Agg

All lessons in this course

  1. Code Interpreter Pattern for Data Analysis
  2. Pandas-Driven Data Agent Tools
  3. Automated Chart and Visualization Generation
  4. Statistical Summary Agents
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