Automations Improvements

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​@kyle.masterson 

Wow, these are such fantastic improvements that we have all wanted to see for so many years!!

Thank you so much for all of this!

This announcement, along the 15 new features you announced last week, have made me & all of my clients very excited about the Bending Spoons acquisition.

And this is just the beginning of what’s to come, too!

Thanks to Bending Spoons, I think we are entering a brand new Golden Age of Airtable!

Thank you for being a big part of this very exciting time, and for helping to make all of this happen!

Airtable is dead! Long live Airtable!

Best,
Scott

- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant 

With the increase in automations (thank you!!) it would be nice to have more than 25 automation sections to keep things organized. And like showing the number of automations remaining, would be nice if it showed the number of automation sections remaining.

Thank you for your lovely words Scott. I’m glad we can help make this exciting time possible, and as you said, it is just the beginning! 

A great set of updates. A few things I’d like to see the next time Automations get some love:

1. When editing a script, please get rid of the “New variable type: secrets” banner. They’ve been a feature for over a year and a half lol
2. I’d love if automation descriptions were more visible for better documentation.
3. It would be useful to have an action after a loop.
4. Lastly, we need some kind of feature that allows us to handle failures gracefully, such as “on error, trigger a specific automation” that might email the right people (who are not creators in the base), file a support ticket, etc. For inspiration, n8n has this feature.

I notice the MCP can’t seem to use the “base structure” or “a specific time” inputs for scripts. While the dependency checker is smart enough to recognize field ids added as plain text to inputs, I think it would be good for consistency if the MCP allowed for all possible inputs to be handled programmatically. 

Great improvements! Delete as action and comparing dates are excellent low hanging fruit that needed unnecessary workarounds, love it!

As others have mentioned here, for automation improvements moving forward some other angles to look would be…

• Failures: Ways to handle failure states better, and especially more information on what went wrong would be hugely useful.
• Triggers: Some new triggers could be really impactful too. I think over on Reddit someone mentioned a trigger of When Record has specific change. Another common pain point for new users is writing “When Record Created” automations that trigger with blank records
• Integrations: A lot of us use 3rd party integration platforms (n8n, Make, etc) but the more I can do in the native platform the better. The more native integrations the better imo. (If only Airtable was now part of a company with a SaaS stack of other applications… oh wait...)

Thanks for the additional suggestions -- a few quick updates:

​@Joseph_Schieffe Good point! All users can now add up to 50 sections, and we display the count like we do for Automations.

​@Kamille_Parks11 The secrets banner will be gone shortly, and to the MCP point, those inputs were technically supported but we’re clarifying the documentation so agents will understand they can use them.

Your other suggestions (and ​yours @DisraeliGears01) are also great, just more involved  to implement so we’ll be looking into those for the future. 

​@alexanderconway thank you for more automation sections and the count remaining!