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Question

How do you document your Airable Bases?

  • February 2, 2026
  • 4 replies
  • 29 views

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I’m curious about external Airtable documentation. How do you document the setup of your Airtable bases?

My team uses a couple of bases and we’re exploring how best to document them. We use Notion for other purposes, including knowledge management. We’re working on user guides for how staff use the bases, but my question for this group is more about the technical documentation.

I started playing around with the idea of documenting each table and their fields in Notion databases. That quickly started to feel like we’d sort of just be recreating the base structure in a way that is very difficult to keep up with. 

We feel the need to have external documentation (to include documenting integrated forms in Fillout, some automations in Make, etc.), but haven’t yet landed on the right format and scale. Would greatly appreciate hearing what anyone else does.

4 replies

ScottWorld
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  • Genius
  • February 3, 2026

I’ve never used it before, but I’ve heard great things about Scribe for documenting complex systems. Might be worth checking out!

- ScottWorld, Best Airtable Consultant


TheTimeSavingCo
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Yeah it’s...pretty manual and painful

For me, I have a table where each record represents a Field and it’s kept up to date with a script that runs once a day which works fine.  (Grabs all the tables then grabs each field via the Web API and then updates / creates the records)

But in order for it to be really useful I need to log all of the automations / workflows each field is used in which is the bit that’s much harder to deal with I’m afraid


VikasVimal
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  • Inspiring
  • February 3, 2026

It’s a pain for most no-code tools. They simply don’t have enough context to reliably create good system documentation.

I have probably built over 1000 bases in last 5 years. My current stack is Airtable + Zite + N8n.

When building a solution, I need to map all three. So, I built a tracker that tracks changes made to those over time. It is still manual, but it works. I have a base with Airtable AppIDs and Corresponding Schema View Only PATs.

One N8n scenario runs, gets schema, compresses it to remove redundant text and brings the size down by 50% compared to original Airtable response. Then compares to prev schema of same app and makes a note of the changes in a Schema Tracker Airtable Base. An AI field creates a human readable summary. This allows me to build a timeline of changes. Same mechanism for N8n. For Zite, I made a custom tool that compresses the Zite export by 90% and exports it as md.

I also have a story mapping tool that allows me to create user stories based on my client conversations.

User stories + Airtable and N8n Schema changes + Zite export [plan + db + automation + UI] = enough data for any good AI to generate documentation. When changes occur, only send the changes after prev doc generation and ask it to update the doc. Easy peasy. But it was pretty tough to build something that has good amount of context, and can reliably output good documentation without hallucinating half of it.

Here’s some of my work: vikasvimal.com/work


Mike_AutomaticN
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Not specifically for base architecture and every single field, but in general terms I build a workflow diagram in whimsical, including urls to specific views, automations etc, as well as screenshots from specific interfaces, forms, etc!

 

Completely different matter, but would love to have you join the March 2026 AT Community led Hackathon! Make sure to sign up!!

 

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation 
YouTube Channel