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I’m interested in the community’s thoughts on AI-Native, in particular Build mode.

I’ve been building Airtable solutions with clients for many years now (since 2018). Hundreds of bases in hyndreds of client workspaces. Some are very active collaborators, some just want us to do it all for them. But they all depend on us to keep their system stable. 

Am I the only one that’s a little nervous that clients (or team mates if you are in-house) can change the build  just by entering a prompt. Will things break? (maybe not if Omni is just adding tables and columns). Will bloat ensue? what are the guardrails?

Thoughts?

Peter from featurepower.com

Totally hear you, Peter.

Good news - Omni follows Airtable’s permission rules. Editors can’t add fields or tables, so they can’t mess with your schema via prompt. Only Creators or Owners can make those changes, and if they already have that level of access, they could break things the old-fashioned way anyway.

So Omni isn’t the problem - access and end user education are. If someone’s a Creator, they’ve always had the power to cause chaos. Omni just makes it easier to do that faster and with less awareness.😅 

Might be time for some friendly training slides titled “Prompt Responsibly.” You locking clients down to Editor now, or letting folks live on the edge a little? 

As for the bloat, we flagged that too. We asked if Omni could be smart enough to recognize when fields or tables already exist and avoid duplicating them. It’s on their radar and they’re planning improvements. But honestly, that’s always been part of the deal - we’ve just got to build with intention and not let things spiral.


Great comment ​@laurenb. Same risks and opportunities as before, just magnified.