ZD 25.49: The Art and Science of Airtable

Airtable is an interesting tool I have used a lot. Here is my long term review.

Airtable is an interesting tool worthy of a long-term review. In The Distilled Spirit, we learn that not everyone loves AI, ponder the danger of a gambling society, learn about how we can better use NotebookLM and perhaps even find another gift guide.

The Lightweight Database in the Sky

Airtable looks like a relational database, feels like a spreadsheet and smells like an event store. It has aspects of lots of different data tools and does a very good job of what it sets out to do. It is not perfect for everything but it is good enough for many things. It can be a flexible layer in your stack if you can fight the integration battles successfully.

I have been using Airtable successfully for the last four years. Some of the more interesting projects include:

• A multi-Airtable base solution for managing event space requests, event planning and fulfillment with a conjoined production tracking and management system for a fairly busy event space and team. Includes a dedicated multi-tenant approval system, integrations with Box and Slack via Zapier to manage file storage and communications channels.

• A heavily automated AI news tracking system. Ingests articles from SLACK and other tools, articles are automatically loaded and summarized. Distributes newsletters including AI summaries via multiple channels weekly.

• An automated social media tracking system that watches a large number of users but uses AI to filter the posts down to a more manageable number for human curation.

• The brains of a very high profile exhibit.

Here are my notes after a few years of using and building on the platform.

Elegant Simplicity

Airtable fulfills its core promise: it provides a simple, approachable database that empowers advanced end users to build effective solutions quickly. The interface is clean, intuitive, and accessible without sacrificing capability.

For many users, Airtable never gets past the spreadsheet. Just like Microsoft Access many users just use the tables and never get to the forms. In Airtable’s case, the interface layer is known as “Interfaces”. The tool started pretty rough and fairly limited, but Airtable’s product team has put a lot of work in and it has dramatically improved. Mobile is there too now in some capacities, closing a major hole in the stack.

Airtable forms are another example of this. The updated versions are a huge step up over the legacy implementation. They look much cleaner and are much more flexible. They are still limited — no ability to create related records is a particular pain point in many workflows. At the end of the day, most users can build a table, then build a form and share it which is a net win.

Synchronization and Automation

One of Airtable’s best features is sync — the ability to synchronize data between bases. You can choose a set of records which are effectively included in the other database instance, sharing data automagically. You can even extend this data in the other base, it is effectively a first class citizen. Airtable has recently enabled 2-way and related record synchronization, opening more doors with this great feature.

Automation is another core feature of the product. It features a pretty limited but effective for what it is automation tool. Simplicity is the main selling point — it is not as complicated as a Zapier or a Make, making it a lot easier for many users to approach. They have some pretty elegant triggers — the ability to have different triggers on different fields is useful. It supports incoming webhooks as a trigger which opens the door to many possibilities.

Automation is another space where they have been investing. The recent addition of an email trigger is a nice feature. Especially combined with the new AI features, you can imagine workflows where users don’t even need to use forms, they can just email you the request and AI can extract the information to the system just like they wanted to do in their heart of hearts.

Airtable automation is great — but it has a lot of limitations. You can only have 50 automations for a given base. It does support branching logic, but it is limited to a single instance within your automation. Loops are also supported, but mutually exclusive from the branching logic. Finally error handling is very, very limited at best. Notifications only go to the last editor with no way to have someone on pager duty. If the ETL process matters, you probably need to manage it upstream from Airtable and hand Airtable very clean data for your own sanity.

Highs and Lows of Collaboration

Airtable collaboration within the enterprise is great. Sharing among users in your workspace or on your team is fun and easy. If anything, the IT administrator in me thinks it is a bit too easy to share and too hard to control.

Sharing beyond your workspace — especially in the enterprise — is difficult, and outside editing for smaller groups is particularly tricky. As a result, many teams rely on tools like Softr or Fillout to build workable 2‑way extranet solutions.

Lack of an exportable reporting layer is another challenge. Sometimes you just need a printout or a digital equivalent to ship. If you are not in Google Docs it is a challenge to get anything useful out of the tool on that front. They need Office 365 integration and Word on the list. Excel (and Google Sheets) would also be an important addition to the stack.

This Developer’s Wishlist

Airtable is great, but there are some things it really could do better.

As mentioned above, automation management needs some love on a few levels. Error handling would be a great place to start there.

External collaboration and better reporting options would be great. A native JSON export would be a really good add too.

Airtable is not a relational database, but it would be great to do some set based operations somehow. Having some form of SQL would be absolutely amazing.

The biggest flaw is the lack of validation — you cannot validate a record before executing a button click, at least not directly. You have to roll back the code, then you have no way to tell the end user their action did not take. Some way to do this would be life changing.

An Exciting Future

Airtable is a great platform and it is a really good choice for a generic, lightweight database in the sky. I would not hesitate to use it in most operations. It is flexible yet reliable and easy enough to pick up. They are doing a good job of continually improving the platform and I’m excited to see where it is going.

At its best, Airtable embodies a modern tooling philosophy: give people just enough structure to stay organized, and just enough freedom to build what they actually need.

The Distilled Spirit

The Lead

🥰 I Love AI, Why Doesn’t Everyone? (Noah Smith)
It turns out being excited about AI is a minority position in today’s America.

📉 The Vibecession Era (Astral Codex Ten)
Are we are living a vibecession? What is causing it? A deep dive into both questions.

🫧 Which Parts of AI are in a Bubble Today? (Oguz Erkan)
AI investment exists on several planes, some of it is a saner play than others. What you are in matters.

🎲 The Danger of a Gambling Society (People's Art of War)
Prediction markets make it easy to bet on anything, creating a financialization of reality. Gambling has moved from the fringes of society into center stage. What could be the harm?

Technology Then and Now

🤖 Agentic E-Commerce Is Coming (Enterprise AI Trends)
Major AI vendors are building commerce experiences directly into their chatbots. It is going to change retail, but how?

🌐 JavaScript: the Hack that Runs the Internet (Arstechnica)
Thirty years ago Brendan Eich hacked together a working prototype of the language that runs the internet and many other apps you know and love.

🪖 Syndication Format Wars (Buttondown)
RSS won the syndication wars against some big companies. It works today — every substack has a RSS feed, including this one.

AI Pro Tips

📓 NotebookLM Video Guide (Jeremy Caplan)
Google’s NotebookLM is an amazing tool. This is a great text and video guide to taking advantage of all of its new features.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 The Ultimate Guide to Gemini (Future-Proof Your Career with AI )
This is a great intro to Gemini especially if your world was ChatGPT before the recent updates converted you.

🖼️ Creating Complex Infographics (Wondering About AI)
AI made cool images, but complex infographics were beyond the tool until Nano Banana Pro hit the scene.

🧑‍💻 Claude Code for Non-Coders (Cash & Cache)
Claude code can also organize your files and do research.

Fun Stuff (Read: More Gift Guides)

🥚 Egg Color Guidance (BROKEN PALATE)
It turns out it what is inside that counts.

🧳 Things We Never Travel Without (First Class Jerk)
Travel accessories for the discerning traveler.

🎁 Good Thinking Gift Guide (GOOD THINKING)
Gift like the cool kids. Lots of interesting brands.

The Look

The pandemic recovery has been K-shaped.

Did you enjoy reading this post? Hit the ♥ button above or below because it helps more people discover great Substacks like this one and it helps train your algorithm to get you more posts you like. Please share here or in your networks to help us grow!