Agreed on SQL being the best exploratory interface for agents. I've been building Logchef[1], an open-source log viewer for ClickHouse, and found the same thing — when you give an LLM the table schema, it writes surprisingly good ClickHouse SQL. I support both a simpler DSL (LogchefQL, compiles to type-aware SQL on the backend) and raw SQL, and honestly raw SQL wins for the agent use case — more flexible, more training data in the corpus.

I took this a few steps further beyond the web UI's AI assistant. There's an MCP server[2] so any AI assistant (Claude Desktop, Cursor, etc.) can discover your log sources, introspect schemas, and query directly. And a Rust CLI[3] with syntax highlighting and `--output jsonl` for piping — which means you can write a skill[4] that teaches the agent to triage incidents by running `logchef query` and `logchef sql` in a structured investigation workflow (count → group → sample → pivot on trace_id).

The interesting bit is this ends up very similar to what OP describes — an agent that iteratively queries logs to narrow down root cause — except it's composable pieces you self-host rather than an integrated product.

[2] https://github.com/mr-karan/logchef-mcp

[3] https://logchef.app/integration/cli/

[4] https://github.com/mr-karan/logchef/tree/main/.agents/skills...

We gave terabytes of CI logs to an LLM