Danny Fellars: And then I failed to mention, there's gonna be a secret one at the end of this episode, so stick around.
Danny Fellars: There's another one that, I became aware of yesterday that hasn't been announced yet.
Danny Fellars: So, k.
Danny Fellars: Next one, automations.
Danny Fellars: Lots of updates to automation starting with increase in limits.
Danny Fellars: So it used to be, which was crazy, fixed at 50 for every, plan.
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
Danny Fellars: In every plan, every base.
Danny Fellars: So no matter what plan you are on.
Danny Fellars: So now even for free, it went up to 75, which is pretty cool because fifty fifty is probably sufficient for most use cases.
Danny Fellars: And then up to 200 for enterprises.
Danny Fellars: So this is awesome.
Danny Fellars: I've had to make requests for an enterprise account that I consult on.
Danny Fellars: And, multiple times, I've had to go from 50 to...
Danny Fellars: I think they bumped me up to 75, then I had to ask again to get to a 100.
Danny Fellars: Mhmm.
Danny Fellars: So now at two hundred, I don't...
Danny Fellars: I think a 100 is the most I've needed to go up to.
Alli Alosa: I have a client that has a number I've never heard of.
Danny Fellars: Over 200?
Alli Alosa: Yes.
Alli Alosa: But Airtable said that's it.
Alli Alosa: No more.
Danny Fellars: That's it.
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
Danny Fellars: I was gonna say, I thought they told us...
Danny Fellars: I can't remember what they told us, Max.
Danny Fellars: They can go up to.
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
Danny Fellars: More than 200.
Danny Fellars: That's a lot going on.
Alli Alosa: But they did say
Danny Fellars: There's ways to consolidate.
Alli Alosa: Yeah.
Alli Alosa: For sure.
Alli Alosa: Definitely.
Alli Alosa: But this is huge, though.
Alli Alosa: Like, hugely helpful.
Alli Alosa: And sometimes, it's like you just need to quickly make the new automation.
Alli Alosa: You don't wanna spend the time consolidating.
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
Danny Fellars: Right.
Danny Fellars: Right.
Danny Fellars: Right.
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
Danny Fellars: For sure.
Danny Fellars: So that's cool.
Danny Fellars: But that also means, like, they're on board with increasing overall capacity.
Danny Fellars: You know, just more automations running is more on their infrastructure that they've gotta make sure and maintain.
Danny Fellars: They did, I don't know if people saw it.
Danny Fellars: I posted in the BuiltOnAir community.
Danny Fellars: I was getting random errors with using...
Danny Fellars: Linking to, tables or field IDs.
Danny Fellars: They have the option as input into scripts where you can pick, to insert an ID.
Danny Fellars: And those were failing, and it was because they had...
Danny Fellars: They were querying every single run.
Danny Fellars: Every single time that script ran, they were querying the the database to get the IDs.
Danny Fellars: And so sometimes that query was failing, and then it was inserting an empty string for the IDs.
Danny Fellars: And so you get an empty string, and then your script would fail because it was expecting an ID.
Danny Fellars: And that's kind of a static ID.
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
Danny Fellars: So I recommended to them, they need to cache that because what was happening was inside of a loop, if you're looping through records and inserting into a script, it's doing that query every time, and it's the same field on every run.
Danny Fellars: And so I was like, that you should be able to cache and not have to query every time.
Danny Fellars: Because it was...
Danny Fellars: It wasn't failing on every run.
Danny Fellars: It was just, like, random.
Danny Fellars: Well, thank you.
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
Danny Fellars: Well, I don't think they fixed the caching, but what they did do is they implemented an auto retry when it fails.
Alli Alosa: Okay.
Danny Fellars: Now I...
Danny Fellars: I'm no longer seeing the error, so it's happening behind the scenes and auto retries before it.
Danny Fellars: And if it fails, it fails on their end before it goes into the script.
Danny Fellars: So that's the change.
Alli Alosa: That's good.
Alli Alosa: Because I've...
Alli Alosa: That that would happen to me intermittently, you know, for the last...
Alli Alosa: Since they released that feature.
Alli Alosa: And I'd always just been kind of been like, oh, well, that that happens sometimes, I guess.
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
Alli Alosa: I never really looked into it.
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
Danny Fellars: Like, the last couple weeks, it started happening way more more frequently for us, and and so we had to reach out.
Danny Fellars: K.
Danny Fellars: Well, let's look at some of the new features.
Danny Fellars: So in addition to doing more, okay, this is a big one.
Danny Fellars: Delete a record from an automation.
Danny Fellars: You can now delete a record.
Danny Fellars: Is this a good thing or a bad thing?
Alli Alosa: Horrible.
Alli Alosa: I Really?
Alli Alosa: I I...
Alli Alosa: I'm in the do not delete camp.
Alli Alosa: I I I tell my clients, no.
Alli Alosa: I will not help you make an automation to delete things.
Alli Alosa: Like, I I I won't.
Alli Alosa: I will help you put it in a bucket, and then you can manually delete it later.
Alli Alosa: Like
Danny Fellars: Yep.
Danny Fellars: Fair enough.
Alli Alosa: Too much can go wrong with this.
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
Danny Fellars: And it used to be the only way you could do it was through a script, so you had to at least...
Danny Fellars: Which your script could go haywire, and accidentally delete more than you wanted it to.
Danny Fellars: So, yeah, I don't know.
Danny Fellars: I do I do delete things from automations, but what I do, I never...
Danny Fellars: I would never do a delete off of, like, a change in a record.
Danny Fellars: That's kinda scary.
Danny Fellars: My deletes are always, like, on a scheduled...
Danny Fellars: And, usually, I'll implement some kind of buffer where I'm not gonna delete something that's been updated within 6 hours or something.
Danny Fellars: So I track the last modification and say, you know, this this hasn't been modified.
Danny Fellars: Because you don't wanna accidentally...
Danny Fellars: If it's in a state that's a delete state, but it's just there for a second as you're modifying the the settings or something.
Danny Fellars: Mhmm.
Danny Fellars: You know, so you gotta be really careful about about deletes.
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
Danny Fellars: This one, I I I could see people saying, ah, it accidentally triggered on every record.
Alli Alosa: It's like if we're gonna...
Alli Alosa: I would like to see with this maybe an increase in the time you can retrieve things from the trash.
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
Danny Fellars: Yep.
Danny Fellars: Yep.
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
Danny Fellars: So let us know what you think.
Danny Fellars: Are you can't delete or can't not delete?
Danny Fellars: We'll have to form teams on that one.
Alli Alosa: Or at least don't automate deleting, like, unless you're doing something super, like, you know, with a lot of checks like Dan described.
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
Danny Fellars: Okay.
Danny Fellars: Compare to date fields in find records.
Danny Fellars: Find record dynamic comparison has now been extended to support date fields.
Danny Fellars: That means automations can now compare one date field to another directly.
Danny Fellars: So date relative conditions no longer need a workaround.
Danny Fellars: Amazing.
Danny Fellars: It's great.
Alli Alosa: Love it.
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
Danny Fellars: Because before dates, you couldn't...
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
Danny Fellars: This dynamic right there, you couldn't do that, so you could just do, like, static comparisons.
Alli Alosa: Yeah.
Alli Alosa: I was always converting my dates to, like, numbers.
Alli Alosa: Like, I'd, like, do date time format, like, year, month, day, That...
Alli Alosa: Then
Danny Fellars: do it in a text
Alli Alosa: value.
Alli Alosa: Comparison.
Alli Alosa: Yeah.
Alli Alosa: Then make it, like, if it's greater than this number and less than this and, like, now I can just use the fields.
Danny Fellars: Which still may be worth it because sometimes date comparisons don't work the way that you think they do.
Alli Alosa: Yeah.
Danny Fellars: And so can doing doing a tech tech sortable, still might be a good decision because then it it...
Danny Fellars: It's a lot easier to visualize the comparison.
Danny Fellars: Mhmm.
Danny Fellars: So, yeah, this is this is nice, but also gotta be careful, when you're working on this and how you're doing this.
Danny Fellars: Yep.
Danny Fellars: Very cool.
Danny Fellars: Okay.
Danny Fellars: Create and edit custom scripts and automations via MCP.
Danny Fellars: This is a big one.
Alli Alosa: That's awesome.
Danny Fellars: You can now create and edit custom scripts.
Danny Fellars: I haven't tested this.
Danny Fellars: Have you played with this?
Alli Alosa: I have not.
Alli Alosa: I have not.
Alli Alosa: I literally just played with this last week, played with the automations and MCP stuff last week, but this...
Alli Alosa: It was before they released this
Danny Fellars: part.
Alli Alosa: So I'm excited.
Alli Alosa: I I started adding it into my, like, metadata field thing and having Claude update the list of, like, what's being used and what automation.
Alli Alosa: So if if it can even just read the scripts, for me, that would be amazing.
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
Danny Fellars: Right.
Danny Fellars: Now what this means is I'm assuming...
Danny Fellars: I...
Danny Fellars: And I think somebody in BuiltOnAir posted that this also means the MCP can create your input fields for you into the scripts.
Danny Fellars: So no no longer need to manually do the the creation.
Danny Fellars: So that that alone...
Danny Fellars: The scripting, most people were probably having AI write the script and then copy paste, which, you know, isn't isn't the biggest thing, but it's more that manually creating all the input fields.
Danny Fellars: So allowing your MCP to do that, that that piece is huge.
Danny Fellars: So I...
Danny Fellars: That...
Danny Fellars: This one's probably worth a a a segment on a future episode to go through this and show how that could work.
Danny Fellars: Yep.
Danny Fellars: So we'll we'll revisit that one.
Danny Fellars: K.
Danny Fellars: See how many automations you have left.
Danny Fellars: Let's look at that.
Danny Fellars: K.
Danny Fellars: So that's...
Danny Fellars: Now what's interesting...
Danny Fellars: Let's see.
Danny Fellars: Automations.
Danny Fellars: Okay.
Danny Fellars: Where was that?
Alli Alosa: Under create news?
Alli Alosa: Is that what it is?
Danny Fellars: Create.
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
Danny Fellars: Where am I?
Danny Fellars: Okay.
Danny Fellars: Create new.
Danny Fellars: There we go.
Danny Fellars: Okay.
Danny Fellars: So how many, okay.
Danny Fellars: Oh, look at that.
Danny Fellars: Sections.
Danny Fellars: There's 50 sections you can have.
Danny Fellars: I didn't know that.
Alli Alosa: I...
Alli Alosa: This is cool, but I'd also...
Alli Alosa: I mean, and it's hard to say because runs are at a workspace level.
Alli Alosa: Mhmm.
Alli Alosa: It's like...
Alli Alosa: Doesn't really make a whole lot of sense to show them here, but they could visually distinguish that to be like, you know, how many workspace runs you have left.
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
Danny Fellars: Or even show how many have come from this base over a month and how many are available overall.
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
Alli Alosa: Yeah.
Alli Alosa: We need that.
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
Alli Alosa: Like, which one's eating up all the automations?
Alli Alosa: Like Yeah.
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
Danny Fellars: And now here's my question.
Danny Fellars: I was under the impression that, the limit was the number of active automations.
Danny Fellars: No.
Danny Fellars: No?
Danny Fellars: It's created automations?
Alli Alosa: Mhmm.
Danny Fellars: Okay.
Danny Fellars: So even if you have them turned off.
Alli Alosa: Yeah.
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
Danny Fellars: Because sometimes I like to keep them there just for reference.
Danny Fellars: But Same.
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
Danny Fellars: You gotta...
Danny Fellars: I'd have a section of, like, archive or something.
Alli Alosa: I've started putting in...
Alli Alosa: Like, when I turn an automation off and I'm, like, deprecating it, I've started putting a big red x emoji and writing the word deprecated with the date in front of the automation name.
Alli Alosa: So that way, when it shows up, if I'm, like, checking depend...
Alli Alosa: Dependencies for something, I can see, like, oh, it's used in that automation, but it's been deprecated, so I don't care about it.
Alli Alosa: Otherwise, I have to go searching again to check.
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
Alli Alosa: Just a little tip.
Danny Fellars: Cool.
Danny Fellars: Cool.
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
Danny Fellars: So that's useful.
Danny Fellars: K.
Danny Fellars: Search automation catalog.
Danny Fellars: K.
Danny Fellars: This is interesting.
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
Danny Fellars: I saw this come up.
Danny Fellars: I don't...
Danny Fellars: Have you ever used this?
Danny Fellars: I don't think I've ever used No.
Danny Fellars: In the catalog.
Danny Fellars: I think it's good if you're learning and you're and you're just getting started.
Danny Fellars: These are good templates to to kind of build.
Danny Fellars: But at some point, if you know what you're building, these kinda become a nuisance because you're deleting more than it would take to just recreate and configure.
Alli Alosa: Exactly.
Alli Alosa: How many of them do you think use one record created as a trigger?
Danny Fellars: I don't know.
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
Danny Fellars: That's true.
Danny Fellars: Not many.
Danny Fellars: Got it.
Danny Fellars: So there's that.
Danny Fellars: That's nice.
Danny Fellars: Field duplication opens the new field's settings.
Danny Fellars: Let's see.
Danny Fellars: I was gonna say, not an automation, but we had to include it.
Danny Fellars: When you duplicate a field, its configuration panel now opens automatically.
Danny Fellars: So you can rename it or adjust it straight away rather than trying to...
Alli Alosa: Okay.
Danny Fellars: What does that mean?
Danny Fellars: Field duplication.
Alli Alosa: So when you duplicate a field, like, in the...
Alli Alosa: Like, a grid layout.
Danny Fellars: So just anywhere.
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
Danny Fellars: Gotcha.
Danny Fellars: Once it comes up.
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
Danny Fellars: That's right.
Danny Fellars: Before, it would just show, and then you had to go into edit.
Danny Fellars: Now it'll bring, which makes sense because you're always gonna wanna configure it once you duplicate, at least rename it.
Alli Alosa: Mhmm.
Alli Alosa: It's taking its time.
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
Danny Fellars: It is.
Danny Fellars: It's not a big table.
Danny Fellars: K.
Danny Fellars: Performance improvements is the next one.
Alli Alosa: I noticed the other day or yesterday...
Alli Alosa: I don't know how long it's been this way, but I was writing a prompt inside of an AI agent field.
Alli Alosa: There you go.
Alli Alosa: Nice.
Danny Fellars: Yep.
Alli Alosa: And I was able to expand it and get, like, a full screen text edit box, which was amazing.
Danny Fellars: That was on the on the AI field?
Alli Alosa: Yeah.
Alli Alosa: Yeah.
Alli Alosa: Then expand.
Alli Alosa: Oh.
Alli Alosa: What?
Danny Fellars: They need this for formula too.
Alli Alosa: Right?
Danny Fellars: Right.
Danny Fellars: Oh, yeah.
Danny Fellars: That's awesome.
Alli Alosa: Really cool.
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
Danny Fellars: Yes.
Danny Fellars: Please do this for formula.
Danny Fellars: I was on my laptop.
Danny Fellars: I was working on a trip, and I was...
Danny Fellars: I didn't have enough room in the formula, and I couldn't, like, drag it.
Danny Fellars: It was so annoying.
Alli Alosa: Oh, it's so frustrating.
Alli Alosa: And when...
Alli Alosa: In roll up field, sometimes the the window's, like, literally, like, this big.
Alli Alosa: You're, like, can't.
Danny Fellars: I couldn't make this bigger.
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
Danny Fellars: It definitely needs the expand.
Danny Fellars: And there's no reason why they couldn't do that.
Danny Fellars: Right.
Danny Fellars: Same thing.
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
Danny Fellars: Please add that.
Danny Fellars: That would be nice.
Danny Fellars: Especially if you're...
Danny Fellars: You know, to incorporate AI into your formulas.