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All right. Welcome back to the built on air podcast. We are in
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Korean season 25 episode 4, halfway through the season, good to be back with you, Kamille and Ali as always. And today we’re gonna have a fun show. We’re gonna get into some AI, some mCP, and all sorts of acronyms that we’re going to be talking about today. Camille’s gonna lead the discussion.
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But before that, there have been some updates that we can highlight.
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Notice two things to to updates came out. One of them was the slack integration being able to ask are table questions directly from slack. So you can connect your. I assume it just uses the mCP from from a slack client and enables you to interact with it. So that’s kind of cool either be played with that.
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Yeah.
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Yeah, I might need to set that up.
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Could do that in our built on our Slack.
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Yeah, and the other one that’s really cool that we’ve been kind of hinting at is automations are now available through the mCP environment. So and at first, I thought it was just gonna be a read-only. So you could read but you can actually create automation which I believe we’re going to be doing today. So
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That’s kind of more because can you on the interfaces? Can you create interfaces through the mCP or just read them? You can you can create them. Yes. So what I’m about to go over was 100% done by Claude I have not made any adjustments to it and I’ll talk about where it got stuck.
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Nice.
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Yeah. So limitations on on this endpoint I know it can’t handle script steps. Scripting steps is that the only one can I handle all the rest? It says it as a limited support for anything that’s not listed in its announcement but it does have like vague support for it. Was that mean? I don’t know, it’s fairly robust. It can’t turn on automation or publish changes to it, automation has already on, so it’ll make edits and then you have to go into airtable to publish. It can delete an automation that is already off.
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um, and yeah, it is pretty good support for Native airtable triggers with the exception of webhook
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and you the actions, you’re probably using in an automation of other than script it can handle.
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Awesome.
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Just what so I can do. Oh yeah, I can do conditional and repeating groups. Very cool.
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All right, so yeah. So that’s pretty powerful. So you can start to automate automations
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Things of that nature. So very cool.
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And yeah I think those are the latest updates. So with that, let’s dig in, we’ll see a live example of this automation creation. So Kamille, get to your screen.
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Go. So first things first are tables updated. Its developer docs and Things Are
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I don’t know. There have been more flashy with that, the agentic tools section which is the worthy mCP and all this tools is described is much lengthier than it was before, which is a good thing. And then the other types of developer documentation was updated as well. You may notice that data layer extensions is not visible here.
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Again, you’re able to quietly deprecated.
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You know that feature that’s fine. I guess interface extensions are still there. Today, we’re talking about MCPE so I would recommend everyone to look at the tool section because it will say exactly what the mCP can now do.
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So, I had it.
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I gave it a pretty basic example, in my airtable universe, I have a meal planner and recipe repository base, and I
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Wanted to see how much of it clawed could build from scratch. So unfortunately, I don’t have the original prompt with me but everything you see before you was a generated through two to three prompts. And like I said before, I’ll walk through what it wasn’t able to do and how it differed from. How I originally designed this idea of having a meal planner that allowed you to have to increase the yield. You’re doing, for example, if the recipes for four but you’re cooking for eight double all of your ingredients and then have that be reflected in your shop and list.
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So, it was able to pull together a pretty good, schema. Overall I would say again, different from how I would do it, but if it works, it works.
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General ideas. You need a place to see your recipes. Every recipe includes ingredients. Those ingredients need to have certain quantities, so that’s where this comes in into play, whereas Being Greedy, your meals could be a combination of one or more different recipes. And it could also be leftovers of a previously cooked meal,
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Meal recipes is the junction table. That connects recipes to meals.
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and then shopping list is a whole separate table that pulls from meal recipes and then basically adds up what the
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Total number of each ingredient that you would need based on the meals. You’re going to have in that coming week. As we go along, you’ll notice that it is provided description on many things that would probably want to description for. So every table, it’s put one and then some of the more important feels also got descriptions as they were being created.
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It only created one automation based on the original prompt. I gave it, this is to generate that shopping list. So when that Junction table, when I said, I’m making this recipe for this meal, that’s the tricker.
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It’s basically going to find all of those ingredients and then add them to the shopping list. This is a complete departure from how I originally designed this. When I was building it for myself but again it works so it’s fine.
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Like I said before, it can’t turn automations on. That is something a person would have to do. So I’m going to do that.
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You’ll notice it also added the description to the automation which is very helpful. And what I’ve noticed is that, it also does It For The Individual steps, which nice
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and then I had it build some interfaces so it was
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Perfectly able to build these interfaces. And again, my prompt was very Bare Bones. I’m a little less impressed of where it stopped for these interfaces. For example,
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It this calendar of what are my upcoming meals, but then like, you can’t click to expand it for whatever reason. It didn’t do that. We can prompt that later to improve upon this.
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Here’s my list of recipes.
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Here’s all the ingredients that might go into a recipe and then my shopping list. So, based on where my current meals are, this is what I would need to buy.
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And then this is the section that it’s billed to have meals plan of across the different days, something that I’ve noticed the mCP.
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Is really in favor of like, starting over. So, this and the this week visualization, could have probably been one page, but for whatever reason, it decided to split this up into two separate pages. And again, none of these
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Were it didn’t come along with detail pages that is an additional prompt. I would most likely have to do
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with that.
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I’m going to move over into.
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A little bit of background. Again I don’t have my original prompt but I did everything with Claude. I’m going to close that. For full screen, I was trying to write before this call add more recipes and my you know, recipe site is not eligible for web scraping. So I’m going to
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Actually.
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Do a whole bunch of copy and paste.
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And hope these images. Don’t screw me over.
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What do we make in?
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Um, I forgot I just sort of picked
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Picked a recipe and I was like, I just need more data in here.
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And then I’m tracking the sources for all of these from all recipes.
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This is, these are things that you should have done before you did a live demo.
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to like, you know,
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Trim it out and make it more at.
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As I like, was building my original version of this by hand.
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The entering recipes was actually the most annoying part because similar to what Claude did I had all the recipes set up so that each ingredient line had a defined number field and then what the ingredient is? And then another field for like, is it chopped? Is it minced? Is it whatever the modifier text is? The problem with that is that you couldn’t really just copy and paste out of whatever the recipe is. You had to like paint it like one by one. So I had this other like utility table that you could copy and paste and then like an automation would parse it up and that felt annoying to do. So the advantage of having a like, really any
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Chat interface could probably do this is now you could just literally copy and paste and hopefully it’s able to parse this out. So this is my first test of actually doing this workflow for the base that quad designed and hoping that it’s able to do this correctly. What I’m expecting.
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Is that all the ingredients?
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Well, let me do this from the base. Actually, I’m expecting one new record here in my recipes and I’m expecting several new records here for recipe and ingredients. And that’s where you see the quantity is broken up and then unit is its own field as well. Prepped note would be whether it’s Minister diced or chopped or anything like that, and then linked to that recipe and then it doesn’t need to be added to a shopping list because I haven’t set, I’m making this meal yet. So that’s what I’m expecting my output to be.
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It’s really thinking, though.
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I do know that like,
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there’s this extra gunk in there, but I’m fine with it, keeping it there, because that’s what I pasted it, right? That’s something that I could clean up after the fact,
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Or just be more careful when I’m coming in pasting.
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It does highlight, you know, this like data entry is changing, you know, where it’s like instead of just feeling out of form or entering each item one at a time.
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This is the new way of data entry.
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Products.
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Vitamin kind of like manually move stuff over this if it works.
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Should be easier to do. But now I’m questioning whether or not it’s faster because it is
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Yeah, live now, yeah.
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is it like looking at what you already have to make sure it doesn’t add duplicate ingredients like
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I’m wondering. Oh let’s let’s look at what it’s actually doing.
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I want to expand this and I don’t know if it’s gonna let me on the web version. So what is helpful is that usually whatever client you’re using allows you to like click and see the actual call, it’s sending out to whatever platform you’re using in this case airtable and that kind of helps you check along the way of if you happen to know that. Well that’s not the table that I want to edit. Then you’re able to like stop it before it got too far, it claims that it’s complete. So I’m gonna look and would you look at that? It does appear to be complete. So just for visual sake, I’m gonna group this. This looks just about right to me. I of course didn’t memorize that recipe but
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Salt and black pepper to taste. That makes sense.
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And then something that also.
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Differs from.
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How I originally did this? I had the like name
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B a a formula field which is similar to what they’ve done here, the summer which is adding all of these fields together but they’ve also kept like a loosie goosie field for I guess a more human readable version. So the difference between 0.5
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And half onion, you know, it’s just easier to read that way. My base to this a little bit differently, using a very long find and like, replace paint for all like the common divisions you would have for food. So I replaced 0.5 with 1/2 and 0.25 with one fourth and so on and so forth, a robust. Because if you ever change the quantity, it won’t update that line item. Exactly. So, you know not to brag. But I thought about this six years ago and I figured it
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but,
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Some of these things are like am I going to be looking at this table ever know? So these are the things that you contend with. Usually what you want to do is you want to be like on a detail page for the recipe so you could see all of the instructions which just see you’re aware. It goes here versus you know looking at each of these tables individually you wouldn’t really interact with this base from the base, you would do it from the interface. So as we’re kind of playing around I want to like take note of the things that I would tweak this. I would have it as
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Rich text. So that this is formatted. It is like numbers. I’m just going to double check and it doesn’t have enable Rich formatting on and this kind of gets into the area of what can’t the mCP do?
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I did some previous testing with a different base, that was a little bit more complicated and it’s able to do formulas and roll ups and lookups which surprised me. Because before you you can do that with the API but you can do it with the mCP but what it can’t do is it can’t do conditional Roll-Ups or conditional lookups. It’ll build the the roll-up for you, but you have to go in and then add the condition to it. For whatever reason that part of the setting is not exposed via the mCP, so there’s going to be some of that probably all over the place. Some of these fields are going to have some of their settings, locked off, so that you can only edit them by going back into your table.
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And with that, I’m going to try and see.
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make the
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Instructions, Fields recipes. People, Rich. Text formatting.
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I’m just going to see if it can do that.
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You can also it.
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I remember chatting with it, to ask you like what Fields it could and couldn’t create and I thought it told me that it couldn’t do roll-up Fields it absolutely can now do roll-up fields that might have been in the like,
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Recent batch of updates that they did the to the mCP last week. So it’s straight up told me that it can’t do it. So after we verify that it can’t do stuff, I’m going to go back and actually do the thing.
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So, I’m going to do this and then, what is it?
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Troll, shifts, nine, eight, that one.
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so,
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I don’t know. Hopefully, the next time it parses out instructions.
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It would do this as Rich formatting. And then part of your prompt is probably going to be this uses markdown. Or it can use markdown. I should say you would probably tell Claude this field when you’re populating it use markdown or something to that effect, and then it would now come with a numbers. Nice and neat. So, to test whether or not, I’ve hallucinated about whether or not it could do a roll up. I’m just going to see. So, add a roll up to the recipes table. That gives
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The latest date.
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He was made.
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It should be able to figure that out itself but I’m gonna say from the meal recipes table.
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It’s a lot of waiting.
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Yeah.
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and these are the kinds of
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Of things of like when you’re doing adjustments to a base like this, sometimes it will be faster if you just do it yourself, but making sweeping changes or a lot of changes in quick succession.
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It will be faster for AI to do it, so it’s sometimes it’s a judgment call. It’s good to know what it can do, but it’s also like sometimes just go in there, do it yourself. So it was able to make this role up, right? But it this is what I was referring to. It can’t do this setting here, only include I’ve tried that before, and I told me it. Couldn’t do it as it, did it, it added a description, which I cannot stress enough. So helpful, I don’t know if that instructions from the mCP just in general or if it’s Cloud specifically, but in all of my tests, it will add descriptions to things, that probably should happen to description. Like the notes and instructions Fields don’t have a description, but you shouldn’t need to describe.
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What those are right. Those are simple enough, but some of these other fields, I think it’s pretty good at knowing when to be descriptive and it saves me. The headache of trying to document this later down the line. Yeah.
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Um, and with that, I think I want to start improving what these interfaces are. So I did not publish this interface, Claude made the interfaces and publish them themselves itself. There was something
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About a limitation of not.
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Publishing interfaces but I could be wrong. I think it could publish brand new interfaces, just fine. But it may be like automation where it can’t publish changes to and interface that I’m going to test right now because here’s a published interface and I’m about to request changes for it.
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So ideally if I’m using this in my day-to-day, I would look at the this week page and I would want to click on a meal that I’m trying to make and I would want this to open up a detail page that lists all of the recipes I’m going to make for that meal. And then I want to be able to click on every recipe and see. Well, what are the instructions? What are the ingredients? All of that. Good stuff that’s not in here yet. I want to see what Claude and the mCP can do to make that more.
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Straightforward for me.
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So, let’s just see.
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Improve the interfaces by allowing.
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users to click into a record detail for
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a recipes and meal.
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Recipes.
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I’m leaving it open-ended so that it can decide for itself. How to design the page. I want to see what it does first and then tweak along the way if this were for a like a real project I would be very descriptive of like I need these fields visible. I need these fields editable. This should come first blah blah blah. Now
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I’m surprised I was expecting it to be able to do this so let’s just read through what it can’t do this is when I can’t do the tools I have access to the Airtable integration here. Only lets me create new pages and read existing interface data. There’s no tool available for me editing an existing Pages layout like an enabling blah blah blah.
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And it keeps telling me to do stuff myself which is great at the beginning and then starts to get very annoying at the end because it’s like, well, I want you to do it. That’s why I asked.
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So I think this is what I was misremembering. Absolutely can publish, but it can’t edit an existing page, which is a weakness that they should consider. Yeah.
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Yeah, I’m looking through the tool list and there’s no update page but there is an update automation. So they built up for automation. Yeah, and interfaces has been
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part of the,
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MC for a longer, like,
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You’ve been to what it can do for interfaces but it was able to like read records from an interface long before it could do anything with an automated. That’s why I’m a little taken aback. So because I don’t use this thing yet, or at all I’m going to tell it to create a new page with that in mind.
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That in mind that the detailed pages are so you get one shot to get it right manually. So the real problem with this is that like if you’ve bookmarked or you sent links to specific interface Pages, those pages aren’t going to work anymore because they’re about to be deleted, you know what I mean? So this is
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Fine. And a lot of cases, but it’s also deeply annoying and a lot of other cases. So, I would hope that this is a fast follow for them to make the ability to edit an existing page. Even if it can’t make every single type of it because interfaces are nowadays, a little bit more complicated than when they started. But being able to do something,
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To an existing page without having to start over. That’d be great.
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Again, a very Lucy, goosey prompt. I just want to see what it’s able to do. What it attempts to do on the first pass. And then we’re probably going to be tweaking as we go manually. Since it can’t edit a page in the first place.
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and while its doing this sort of thinking Allie, and Dan, is there anything you would like me to test the mCP for
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Now.
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We talk about what on the interface side, what?
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What page types can or can’t do all page types? I believe all. I haven’t tried to make a custom
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Page type, and I have been trying to make blank either.
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That would be a good test. I think I haven’t seen it. Do overview either. I’ve seen it do dashboard and any of like the full page visualizations, except for custom, I guess.
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And it does record review.
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So, overview blank and custom are the three that I don’t have proof of whether or not it could do that. So I can make that my next prompt of make a blank page. And I wonder if it’ll interpret that correctly. Yeah. And then make an overview, it should be able to do overview. I’d be surprised if it didn’t, which is the kiss of death in Airtable.
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So,
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okay, let’s just see.
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It says it was created recipe details and meal recipe details.
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where,
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My publicist what, right? It’s a it asks you if you want to. Okay, thank you. Okay. So it
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I see what it does.
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I think it thinks and we covered. This was the last episode of like this is a detail page.
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But that’s not what I meant. I meant I meant, I liked the calendar. I thought that was logical of a design choice that like,
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Week by week, I want to click on the day that I’m making the meal. What I wanted was to click this thing.
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and then open up the recipe and then
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you know, I mean, I guess
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this is kind of what I asked for, so I’m mad but I’m not mad at the same time and then
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this one, I
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Feel like I would do risk Being Greedy dance a little bit differently. I probably would have made that like a roll up field or something. So it just doesn’t take that much space but this is fine. I think overall
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These are all the fields, I would expect to see and I don’t know, I would maybe at, I would maybe break.
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This stuff up into a section up at the top but that’s sort of like nitpicking.
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it was able to make,
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the two pages I asked for in not the way I thought it was going to make and that could come down to prompt but
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I do wonder if it is able to make.
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Detail Pages like a literal detail page and not.
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Record review, right? And if you asked it to make a list,
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Like say could you make a new list layout interface page with the detail screen turned on?
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Okay, so I’m saying enable click into record detail, which I think is the, it’s either the exact language or it’s pretty close to what the actual feature is called, when you’re editing on your own in an interface, I want to do this and then all so create one overview page and one
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Blank.
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Page.
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C. And while we’re waiting, just so everyone’s aware at the top of the hour, it’s 9:00 a.m. for me. Another time. For most other people. Probably there’s a Reddit AMA with one of the I want to say product owner’s table.
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And there’s some good questions in there. I wrote a question that’s basically me listing stuff that’s inconsistent about airtable, which, you know,
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I’ll take any opportunity to say stuff’s not consistent. The platform, one of the things that I pointed out. I don’t know if anyone else has noticed this group and sort have the same icon, only on the record review page and it.
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Never noticed that they use the wrong icon. It’s been like that for two years.
[00:31:28]
Oh,
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My comment is the one that says that and a bunch of other stuff. Some of them are actually more important but this one I threw in there to be Petty like, while I am at it. I might as well talk about.
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This madness. So is it what did it just do?
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Did it, did it? Did it go?
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Recipes list.
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Okay, here it is.
[00:31:58]
Yeah. No it’s not opening. A record detail page. Let’s see.
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I don’t.
[00:32:07]
I don’t think it could do detail pages. I don’t think it can.
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You can’t do interesting. Well it’s this is also incorrect. Clicking a row and a list page opens a record detail panel by default. So no extra config was needed there. That’s not.
[00:32:25]
No. Yeah.
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um,
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So Airtable, I have detected a fly. Yeah, I think the instructions that
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I actually don’t know where that misconception is coming from. I would expect the mCP to just say
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It’s been right about all the other things that couldn’t do, which is why this is throwing me through, such a little, when it can’t do something from my experience. It will say exactly where you need to go into Airtable to make that fix. But this is saying something that is not true which is oh it just does that? No it doesn’t it works. Same way is grid.
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Looking at the tool list for the mCP. So you can tell they took their learning. They because they implemented interfaces first. And then recently automations you can tell with automations. They’ve learned some lessons because they actually have a tool and point that get automation instructions, that the client, but they don’t have that for interfaces.
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Hmm, which is why?
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Your your AI model is just figuring that out somewhere else. Yeah, you’re referring to the one I’ve highlighted on screen and
[00:33:51]
they should absolutely continue on and add that to
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interfaces. Now, I haven’t really had any problem with creating or editing tables, creating editing Fields, Etc. Um, but interfaces and automation are more complicated than those. And so I think they both warrant that type of like dedicated instruction tool.
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Yeah, all right.
[00:34:22]
let’s disappointing, because I really wanted to, to just
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Didn’t do the. Oh, right. Yeah, it can’t. So do overview. Yeah. Remember
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When I said, I would be surprised if it couldn’t do overview but that’s the kiss of death and airtable.
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Yeah, I feel like maybe Omni can because I feel like when I’ve done Omni to create stuff, it always puts in an overview page. Well, let’s let’s just
[00:35:01]
just,
[00:35:03]
to prove if that is, in fact true at and
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Overview.
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Interface.
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I’m just gonna say that links to the other pages.
[00:35:22]
um, generally speaking Omni can do more than both the API and the mCP can do
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the things that Omni can do.
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I don’t know if that’s well, documented anywhere like the mCP has this. Now pretty robust documentation session where it lists every single tool that it can do Omni to my knowledge is not have that anywhere. So you kind of just have to know what do you do and what it can’t. There are some help documents that
[00:35:58]
Imply stuff that it can do but it’s not exhaustive list.
[00:36:04]
Yeah.
[00:36:06]
and I’m worried that it says dashboard because that’s the name of a different type of
[00:36:12]
see
[00:36:15]
your dashboard when I say I don’t like Omni. This is what I mean.
[00:36:24]
They have a page called overview unless I’m wrong. Maybe I got the name wrong. Let’s just see.
[00:36:32]
You’re right. It’s called overview.
[00:36:35]
Yeah, would you look at that?
[00:36:44]
Thinks it you told it to do but I told it to link to the other Pages. This is not linking to the other pages.
[00:36:53]
This is
[00:36:55]
you know.
[00:36:59]
What it’s color coded?
[00:37:04]
Yeah, I’m not gonna be all that negative.
[00:37:07]
It’s negative. It’s like could be but my goodness that is not what I said to do.
[00:37:14]
one thing I do like that Omni does when it creates these dashboards is it puts the description on all the charts which
[00:37:22]
I find very helpful.
[00:37:25]
Something I always forget to do and then I struggle with like, what’s the clearest way to write?
[00:37:29]
Yeah, I think a lot of the most I’m going to get out of like Omni and some of the other like AI tools that you could use with airtable, it’s going to be go back and document stuff. That’s what I’m gonna be using it. The most for to be perfectly honest.
[00:37:46]
Except you can’t update those interface pages. Okay now hold on.
[00:37:55]
again, Omni
[00:37:59]
Omni.
[00:38:01]
I want I want to send just this clip to whatever team.
[00:38:07]
Deals with Omni and be like, what did I do wrong?
[00:38:12]
Surely I made a mistake somewhere along the way. He didn’t even do anything. It just told you. Here’s your page.
[00:38:25]
It’s it’s the dichotomy of interacting with.
[00:38:30]
Chat. Widgets and AI. Just in general is sometimes you’ll be like, well,
[00:38:36]
Know what? I really want to do is this and it’ll be like you’re absolutely right, right. And then sometimes it’ll do what Omni just did and it’ll be like, no, no, I’m right.
[00:38:48]
Like, no, you’re not. That’s not what I said.
[00:38:52]
I love Claude. What if you like read what it’s thinking to its self, at least for me it’s like every other paragraph starts with actually
[00:39:01]
Because he’s like actually I need to do this actually I should do this first actually. I need to think about this first. Like that sounds pretty human.
[00:39:11]
Omni update the page.
[00:39:14]
Let’s just see um, update this. Oh, so precious dashboard.
[00:39:24]
To include a, I’m just gonna say another number element.
[00:39:32]
Top.
[00:39:36]
I don’t, what have I won? A summarized
[00:39:42]
Not in cart, you can do.
[00:39:45]
Yeah. Okay. That has
[00:39:48]
Items in the shopping list.
[00:39:59]
For me to overview page based on this.
[00:40:01]
What if it’s the opposite?
[00:40:05]
I feel like it doesn’t keep the context of the chat very easily. Like I I was prompting it to at I wanted to add a field to a custom interface that it had made and I said can you add this field to the screen you just made and it went in like opened my data layer and was like you want me to add the field here and I was like no the field already exists. I just want I wanted in the dashboard. It’s wild. What gets triggered on?
[00:40:35]
Okay. It seems it was added. Okay, so this I’m less mad about because I can see why it did that I mentioned shopping list and that’s a different table and this one up here and because you can only have one source per group
[00:40:52]
Fine. But it can update interface pages. So that is a difference between Omni and the mCP.
[00:41:02]
But nobody can make an overview page. You would see that one more time, create a new page where the type is overview.
[00:41:15]
Type.
[00:41:16]
It overview.
[00:41:18]
Do not create a dashboard.
[00:41:28]
Come on. Omni, I’ve faith in you.
[00:41:31]
I don’t.
[00:41:34]
I’ve been burned before.
[00:41:43]
Doing something.
[00:41:46]
before we this finishes
[00:41:51]
Why why?
[00:41:55]
Wild.
[00:41:56]
Anything that I like about the mCP. And again, I’ve only used Clause. So, I don’t know if it’s entirely coming from Claude in the model I’m using, or if it’s coming from the mCP itself, when it can’t do something, it says, I can’t do this. Here’s how you do it yourself. Omni is like, I can do everything, and whatever you just said, doesn’t matter. I’m gonna do something else.
[00:42:22]
And pretend that’s what you told me to do.
[00:42:25]
Or it’ll pretend it can’t do it even though it can. It’s just because you used the wrong word in your prompt. It’ll be like I can’t do that silly. Yeah. So
[00:42:40]
we’re, we’ve got a couple more minutes before we’re
[00:42:44]
done. I want to find that Reddit Ama.
[00:42:52]
Just because there is a question on it. That asks, what’s the difference between the mCP and Omni? I feel like I’m going to add a comment to this and be like, watch this clip.
[00:43:07]
And it’s not going to answer your question entirely because there are things that Army can do that. The mCP cannot there’s no real roadmap airtable has so we don’t know what they’re adding to the mCP and the near charm or a long-term. The announcement post though. I will call out says that script actions and automations is coming. They are working on it so that is definitively eventually but we don’t know when so Omni can do things at the mCP, can’t
[00:43:42]
But it messes up sometimes in ways that I haven’t seen the mCP deal because when you’re working with the mCP, based on how you set it up on your own account, you’re able to say don’t do this until I approve. It Omni is very gung-ho. It will just sort of do stuff based on your prompt but it’s not going to say, do you want me to do this every single time like you can configure and mCP connection to do?
[00:44:17]
For the Automation in the mCP, can it just lists them all and what sort of better data does it get?
[00:44:27]
Yeah, this is not exciting because it’s only one Automation in this space, but I will say list all automations, or you can tell it to give you the raw Json data, that it gets. And then,
[00:44:48]
I’d love to add it into my like metadata.
[00:44:51]
Pull to like link to the actual fields on a table so I can see it.
[00:44:59]
So my prompt lists all the automation for the base. I want you to summarize it but also give me the raw Json.
[00:45:06]
So it is correct. There is only one it is live, so that’s good. This is very human readable. Great, thank you. And then here the notes. So let’s look at the structure of what an automation is pulled from the mCP. So it will give you the unique ID of that automation, which is so useful for a lot of things, but we’ll get to that later whether or not, it’s live so deployed equals live. So just so you’re aware some of the like terminology because automation’s art and old part of airtable long before mCP access the like,
[00:45:51]
the names of things might not align with what you might think their names just calling that out as you’re reading this for the first time,
[00:45:59]
Trigger. So this is one of the objects that can change shape, depending on what the trigger is like. So if this were record updated, it wouldn’t just be table ID. It would also be which fields, and then if it were record matches condition, you would still see table ID but you would also see the conditions itself and then nodes would be each of the steps. So the trigger is separate from the nodes and then
[00:46:30]
The way that this is structured, depending on the structure of your Automation. And let me just pull that up. So if one can
[00:46:39]
Refresh himself with this. Looks like we have one step and then we have a repeated action and inside that repeated action, it has one step. So thanks to some relatively recent improvements. You could have a condition group
[00:46:54]
And then one of those could include repeating action, or you could have a repeating action. Like, I have. And inside of this, I could have a condition group or a series of condition groups that is important to sort of remind yourself of how an automation could be structured and that will help explain how the node output is structured as well. So, what is useful? And one of the first times that I can recall is seeing the filters of
[00:47:28]
anything in the API. You could like you could get records from of you, but I don’t think you can see what that views filters are.
[00:47:41]
so many sure we’ll correct me if I’m wrong, but
[00:47:45]
With this output from the automation, you can see this is my fine record step.
[00:47:56]
This is my fine record set and you can see exactly what the filter’s are. So let me pull up what that is.
[00:48:06]
That’s whiter.
[00:48:08]
Whatever. There’s only one condition where recipe has any of the recipe from the source source field. So this
[00:48:19]
I, I can kind of understand why they didn’t expose this before but also it’s very useful to have this if you want to
[00:48:28]
If you want similar business logic elsewhere in your application, you need to make things consistent. And in order to do that, you need to know what you were. Tellers were so, um,
[00:48:41]
one condition, and this is all the sort of context it needs. So,
[00:48:47]
I’m gonna work backwards, I guess property. Getter get the ID.
[00:48:55]
From the trigger.
[00:48:58]
And we’re looking at this field so I don’t know if I would have been able to ever in a million years. Guess this is the format that the filters are in.
[00:49:10]
And the more complicated that fine record step is. I’m sure this is going to be even longer. It takes about like 30 lines to constructed filter object. Most of those are closing brackets, but you get the idea, I think in next week, why don’t we save this for next week? We’ll do a deep dive into the automation, MCPE, metadata. We’ll talk about some new features next week. So,
[00:49:42]
Make this a teaser for next week. Yeah. Okay.
[00:49:48]
Stickers out with whatever notes you have.
[00:49:52]
So that’s kind of my high level overview of what I was able to explore using the
[00:50:02]
A specifically myself. I use Claude, the mCP for airtable it’s fairly robust normally when I demo new features from airtable, it’s a lot of me complaining about what they didn’t do. There are some things that it can’t do that are disappointing but I’m not nearly as disappointed as some of the other releases. I think this is a enough of a step forward that there’s genuine improvements and things that I can do give and what it can do today. Personally, updating automations is more useful for me than updating interfaces, because interfaces aren’t that hard. When you’re, you know, when you experienced and you know, you’ve built them enough, you can kind of just bang them out really quickly. Automation, are tedious to configure in my opinion.
[00:50:59]
Overall, pretty good.
[00:51:03]
I like that. Some of the limitations that we’ve had for from the API where resolved being able to create a roll ups and look up and all those
[00:51:12]
Huge, you can’t have them.
[00:51:15]
You know, you can’t do a perfect roll-up in my opinion, which would have the conditional actions and stuff in it, but you can save yourself quite a bit of time with the most recent batch of tools that they have released. And like they said, in one of their announcement posts, they’re working on some new ones in the future. So fingers crossed that that won’t take too too long and maybe buy the end of the summer. We’ll have
[00:51:41]
Even more robust mCP, Integrations with their table.
[00:51:46]
Yeah.
[00:51:48]
Yeah, key takeaway. I get is
[00:51:51]
Specially like on the interface side, it’s nice for proof of concept. You’re not going to be able to build robust production, ready,
[00:52:01]
You know, I don’t know how many interface Pages you to have built, probably thousands and I don’t think it’s ever been perfect. The first time. Updated a page.
[00:52:16]
Yeah, that’s no never not even. I can do it perfectly the first time. So not being able to edit like I said disappointing but I’m sure that that’s coming soon or I should say, it better be coming so it’d be crazy if they didn’t.
[00:52:36]
Yeah. Yeah.
[00:52:38]
Agreed very true so but automation seems a bit more robust. You could probably build out robust automations specially when code. Although that’s kind of scary when
[00:52:51]
It gets to scripting and writes those scripts for you. Honestly, I think that’s why they did it last, which I’m not mad about. But one of the one thing that I actually wanted for scripts, I don’t need to actually update the script. What I wanted to do is this this is so hideous.
[00:53:13]
And annoying. And I like to have I like to group my input variables, together of like these are all the ones that come out of the recipe table. These are the ones that come out of the ingredients table pre-order can’t reorder them. You just so tedious. Setting this up especially if you’re pulling from bass structure which is still someone because you have to click twice, there’s scroll bars. This is the complaining.
[00:53:42]
Seriously, you click. There’s a bug too. Where if you click
[00:53:47]
On it, you click into a table and you’re on the place where you are and because you have to click twice, if you click once on a field by accident and then click on the actual field you want, or on the table and then on a field, it will grab the table ID. So click on like the top one twice, click on the top one quickly and then
[00:54:06]
Filled. It’s hard to explain how to do it but like if you actually believe you, yeah, it’s absolutely bugged. But it’s insane. Like, if you don’t pay attention, I still often will accidentally. Click on the table. Then accidentally click again, but it doesn’t take
[00:54:22]
And then I click a field and then inserts the table ID instead of the field.
[00:54:27]
Yeah, it’s I really weird.
[00:54:30]
I don’t need it to update the script. I needed to let me do things inputs. I don’t want to do this by hand anymore. Please for the love of God.
[00:54:39]
I had a client the other day that
[00:54:42]
Didn’t know that you could do that and somehow ended up hard coding, the field IDs in to the value.
[00:54:51]
Field. Yeah. And it’s still have to do it. Yeah, you’re good. The dependency, the dependency Checker with just the field. Oh, okay. It’s it. Okay. Well then it’s not looking for the token, it’s looking for the value. That’s yeah.
[00:55:09]
Interesting and they use IDs not names. Correct? Yeah. Just I think I think it does that because it’s smart enough to know to change it. If you if you duplicate a base it changes the IDS. So I think it’s always scanning for the field IDs. Yeah and kavan has said this before of like, if you have something that kind of looks like a field or a table ID airtable will do that. I’ll be like, oh I need to change it to something else and so she think they changed that because of kavana I think kavan was the one that was like Hey duplicated but all the IDS are wrong. Yeah she’s mentioned it more than once because I think
[00:55:54]
It was one of those things that I didn’t have to experience, but as soon as kavan, like pointed it out, I was like, oh, wait a minute. That’s
[00:56:01]
Terrible. Actually. No. It’s
[00:56:05]
Used to happen to me a lot more before they introduced the input variables.
[00:56:11]
Yeah.
[00:56:12]
Yeah. Ideally they could just put a chatbot just like to help you create a formula field with the yeah. I should just put that underneath those input variables.
[00:56:24]
Yeah.
[00:56:25]
That would be ideal. Let me let me enter and put variables as Json. Just give me one day. Let me type. Yeah, yeah. Then you can have and they I create that for you too. Yeah, it exactly.
[00:56:41]
and it could work just like,
[00:56:46]
You know, you have this big text box basically and I could pull in value as like tokens, but let me I know how to to type in Json format. Let me do that. Yeah.
[00:57:02]
Right. This is what I want to do. I want to have one thing. This is
[00:57:09]
I’ve lost the plot a little bit but anyway eventually you’ll be able to update scripts via the mCP and again for me personally I just want the experience of putting input variables to be not so painful. And other than that,
[00:57:31]
Pretty good improvements to the mCP. There’s a lot that it would Speed most people up with including myself. Like I said, I’m terrible at adding descriptions. As I go. So, very useful for things like that, interfaces. You might want to do yourself. I didn’t get to forms. It can’t create a form, but it can submit a form which is an interesting use case that I think we should probably explore on its own because one would say, well, why wouldn’t you just have it update the table directly? Well, the form you can enforce a field will either be there. It won’t be there based on what you’ve previously see selected. So that to me was the most interesting addition to the mCP and there’s also an undue action. So now if you have the, if you have clod create a new record and you’re like, oh, actually no that record is bad. You can say, undo that and it will literally undo the action. It’s
[00:58:31]
Not deleting the record, its undoing the action, which is a great addition, that is not as, like, sexy as some of the other ones, but it’s like it’s a brilliant addition.
[00:58:44]
Yeah cool. Yeah let’s do that next week’s our review the latest so we’ll go deep into that. Maybe we’ll play with the slack integration. See how it differs from other clients and maybe something else will come out this week. We can play with so
[00:59:01]
Awesome. Thank you Kamille, for sharing that and get her insights into building with mCP. We’ll be back next week. Everybody have a good week.