Kuovonne's Guide to Scripting in Airtable

Explore

Kuovonne's Guide to Scripting in Airtable

Kuovonne's Guide to Scripting in Airtable

So you want to learn Scripting?

Can AI write my script?

⁠

Tip Jar

⁠

Your donations tell Kuovonne that you value her content and want her to continue publishing.

⁠

Maybe. It depends on several factors:

How complex is your script? While AI can product short scripts, the more complex logic you want to perform, the less likely it is that AI will produce satisfactory results.

How well can you articulate what you want the script to do? The hardest part of a coding project is often knowing exactly what the code should do, not drafting the code.

How much debugging can you do? AI rarely generates code that does exactly what you want the first time.

How comfortable are you at identifying and testing edge cases? If you don’t consider edge cases, the script may product unexpected results. The worst case scenario is not having the script fail. The worst case scenario is that the script silently produces the wrong results without you ever realizing it, and you make important decisions based on those wrong results.

Who will maintain the code? If AI writes the script and you don’t fully understand the code, what will you do when you want the code updated? Updating code will likely add complexity, and the more complex the logic, the less likely that AI will product satisfactory results. If the code is written by someone who understands the code (either you or someone you hire), then that person will have a better shot at maintaining the code without breaking anything.

I have seen people ask for help with AI-produced scripts with the following problems:

Using features that do not exist in Airtable scripting, but do exist in the Web API.

Misleading variable names.

Leaving out necessary parameters when calling functions.

Referencing libraries, even though Airtable scripting cannot use libraries.

Writing functions but never calling them.

Not awaiting asynchronous functions.

Unnecessarily complicated code.

These people are usually new to scripting and have spent hours on these scripts and are posting because they have no idea why their scripts don’t work.

⁠

The content in this guide is free, but creating it takes time and money. If you like this content,

buy Kuovonne a sandwich

⁠

Gallery

Want to print your doc?
This is not the way.

Try clicking the ⋯ next to your doc name or using a keyboard shortcut (

CtrlP

) instead.