navarre.aiClarisTalk AI · the FileMaker AI podcast
Stathis Askaridis shows AI Built front-end with FileMaker on back
Matt talks with Stathis Askaridis (We Know Data and Pineapple.gr) about his method of developing with FileMaker. Stathis shows examples of this workflow, which is a very simple FileMaker database with just a few scripts, NO RELATIONSHIPS, and a layout with a WebViewer. All the dev is done/assisted by Claude Code, Codex, etc. which delivers HTML / CSS / JavaScript. Data edits? Easily done with File
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Transcript
Transcribed by machine (whisper, large model), 11,900 words. Names and product terms are sometimes misheard; the audio is the record.
Claris Talk AI continues. Today our guest is Stathis Askaridis from Thessaloniki. Welcome. Thank you, Matt. Thank you for having me. Yeah, you and I work together for We Know Data. I do a bunch of training there, you do development there, and then have your own company, Pineapple, as well. We're here to talk about some crazy stuff that you have showed me. A different workflow using AI with FileMaker, and I'm super curious. I want to hear your approach and then I want to see some demos as well, and how you arrived at it too. Yeah, so the approach is basically use AI for front-end. To me, the only and biggest talents of doing FileMaker work nowadays is the layout mode, and the way that you use it. And I think that's the most important thing that you need to do.
Also, I don't like building UIs. I enjoy scripting. I enjoy database architecture. I don't enjoy putting effort in the aesthetics of a UI, which is not great because the UI is what a client views. So this is how a non-technical client will judge a system by the UI. Everybody will. But everything has to be in balance. But I would say, and I think I agree with you, that FileMaker's UI tools haven't really kept up with modern times. You can make a good-looking layout, but it's very limited what you can do. No horizontal portals, and very limited types of graphics that you can use. Anyway, continue. Yeah, and no mobile device. No mobile devices. No mobile devices. No mobile devices. Yeah, and no mobile-friendly like, you know-- Oh, yeah. Dark mode, light mode. No automatic. Well, really, I mean, WebDirect is quite limited anyway. No responsive design.
Yeah, no responsive design is also an issue. But this all came out as I started doing web viewers. So a couple of years ago, I did a micro training slash-- Diploma in IT, which was very helpful, which I basically learned HTML, JavaScript, CSS, PHP, Java, Python. Just the foundation, which was enough. Because what I found was just with a couple of lessons of HTML, CSS, and all the rest, you can get started because the basics are the main barrier between starting something. If you are the proper FileMaker developer and you know how things work, it's just learning the basics. And also, another big point for FileMaker is that I've worked with a lot of agencies and teams, and I found FileMaker developers having a great understanding, not just because of their consulting role, but we-- We-- We-- We learned database design. We learned back-end development. We meddled that
with the UI. We have a full-stack engine that doesn't support separation. So we have a complete understanding of how to set up a server. Or another great example would be just integrations. A normal developer is not as good as we are in integration because a normal developer just uses an SDK. We know-- We know-- We know-- Carry-by-carry call what we need to do. So those things build up. And when you have worked as a FileMaker developer for more than five years, you start to have a great understanding of things. And this comes very handy and important in the AI world because with AI, if you can just be on top of things and know which frameworks are the best for you, which are the best for you, which are the best for you, which are popular and trending and which are relevant, and you tell AI to use those tools, then you have another tool on your tool belt. So this comes down to those two things, the UI challenge and the FileMaker expert has a great opportunity in combining those two into using AI
for UI purposes. So this comes down to those two things, the UI challenge and the FileMaker expert has a great opportunity in combining those two into using AI for UI purposes. So this comes down to those two things, the UI challenge and the FileMaker expert has a great opportunity in combining those two into using AI for UI purposes. So this comes down to those two things, the UI challenge and the FileMaker expert has a great opportunity in combining those two into using AI for UI purposes. So this comes down to those two things, the UI challenge and the FileMaker expert has a great opportunity in combining those two into using AI for UI purposes.
So this comes down to those two things, the UI challenge and the FileMaker expert has a great opportunity in combining those two into using AI for UI purposes. So this comes down to those two things, the UI challenge and the FileMaker expert has a great opportunity in combining those two into using AI for UI purposes. So this comes down to those two things, the UI challenge and the FileMaker expert has a great opportunity in combining those two into using AI for UI purposes. So this comes down to those two things, the UI challenge and the FileMaker expert has a great opportunity in combining those two into using AI for UI purposes. : So this comes down to those two things, the UI challenge and the FileMaker expert has a great opportunity in combining those two into using AI for UI purposes.
I put it in sort of a music term. A lot of other developers who are coming up on AI right now are kind of vibe coding, and it's like they're picking up a violin and they're playing it, thinking that they're playing scales and arpeggios, you know, the basic foundation of music. But they're kind of not. They sound okay, but they're not really music. And a FileMaker developer who understands exactly what they want, what the client wants, what to do, what not to do, how to secure it, how to blah, blah, blah. We already know those scales and arpeggios and also how to make a beautiful melody. So we're coming at it with a significant advantage if we can really spend a lot of time on AI, which you have done because I've seen some of your work.
Yeah, exactly. That's exactly what it is, Matt. So basically, we know how to write music. We know what great music sounds like, but we cannot interpret the music diagram into playing. So we don't know how to play, let's say, in this analogy. But now we have an AI tool that can do that. And for the single web viewer approach, yes. Autodeploy, the FileMaker tool, which is the pair to the AutoFMS, I think it's the most popular. It's the most popular FileMaker application in the world. I assume that most FileMaker developers, yeah. AutoFMS, I don't think there is any other FileMaker solution comparing to the usage of AutoFMS. And this is built in one single web viewer.
And this is why you have over-the-air updates without doing deployment. This is why when you're using AutoFMS, you might see an update button coming up. So great. When I first experienced that, that was so great as an experience. So you have a FileMaker application running in a single web viewer. And there's one server saying that we are one version up. And your UI shows that you click update. And just the build code downloads into a field and you're updated. Nothing changes. I think I'd probably say there's like levels of developers, right? A lot of FileMaker developers work on a live system. And they make all the changes. And there isn't a dev and a live.
There's just live. And FileMaker lends itself really well to that until you get to a certain size application. Yeah. Well, I'm very lucky because when I started being a senior professional FileMaker developer, this was a year earlier than the FileMaker data migration to arrive. So I never expected. I never expected to experience the import records situation that you guys, and I don't mean to be. Well, you're also talking about if you do it that way, right? Because I think most FileMaker developers didn't use that import records, export records way. And I think most FileMaker developers also don't use the data migration tool. They just work on a database.
You know, most of FileMaker's customers are 5 or 10 users. And they do the database development live. You can write scripts very safely on a live database. Without messing things up. If you make a new layout or make a new table or something like that, you're going to have record locking issues with users who are logged on. But, you know, avoiding those things and being a careful developer, you can be very successful. Yeah. Yeah. But again, do a certain size and then you get all the way to the top level where you have, you know, dev staging and production. Anyway, yeah, continue. So you work just in this model, huh? Yeah. So the live, no. I used to do live development in.
So it's a transparent communication with the client. Do you want the dead meat, the extra fat that comes with it? But realistically, the problem is not right now because of auto-deploying, which means that it's one button to do a deployment. So you have no excuse not to have separate environments. The question basically is, client, are you willing to test? The dev system and the system, I think this is hit the nail on the head. And I hate that most of them are not willing. So, yeah, so we can write the developers contest and have more leeway to break things in mid development, which you do not have the opportunity to do when you're developing live. Yeah, and and this is actually a great discussion because one of the biggest shifts that.
AI is bringing is shifting the resource needs, the demand. What does this mean? So in the past, the final was like you had a sit load of requirements going down to some of big requirements from your backlog that are going to go into development. And then the bottleneck was the development and then you would have QA, which wasn't as. A bottleneck as development would be, but now thanks to AI in traditional not file maker, but like JavaScript, TypeScript, PHP, Python, et cetera, the bottleneck now is QA because thanks to AI agents, you get the requirements we have due to the enthusiasm. There's also more requirements coming through and you have AI agents working on them and most of the time.
Most of the time they do it right. So the problem is. QA, so accepting those changes, testing them manually because you always going to need some human to test the changes. So the whole industry, it's like it's changing from requiring more developers to requiring more testers. So talk to me about your approach and then let's see some of the demos of what you're working. On and then like how, how much does accelerated and improve the quality of what you do? A lot. So it all started from like little widgets. I used to do little widgets by hand, you know, manual, manual HTML, CSS, JavaScript, like date picker, like sliders and color pickers. We, we all did that.
Then the next. Big web widget I did by hand and it was very important was valueless, like, yeah, so what the problem was that we were creating extra relationships, a lot of times just for conditional values, basically values things, I guess, I mean, I do those a totally different way and pure file maker without relationships and it's. I love the approach. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Using queries. You also have the other issue where the pop up menu doesn't work the same in Windows as in macOS, which is the most classic situation. Right. Yeah. Those are, those are, those are basically unchanged features for more than a decade, I think. Yeah. I think that comes from the OS.
So I don't think it's clear. I don't think it's clear. I don't think it's clear. Yeah. I think it's clear. I think it's clear. I think it's clear. I think it's clear. I think it's clear. I think it's clear. I think it's clear. I think it's clear. I think it's clear. I think it's clear. I think it's clear. I think it's clear. I think it's clear. I think it's clear. I think it's clear. I think it's clear. I think it's clear. I think it's clear. I think it's clear. I think it's clear. I think it's clear. I think it's clear. I think it's clear. I think it's clear. I think it's clear. I think it's clear. Yeah. portal they didn't have sort they didn't have filter and then they added sort and filter then they added the ability like if a portal was really big to give you a little spinner thing tell you what was going on you know so they've actually added some features to portals over the years um and then you know other areas just haven't had any haven't had any love uh same with web viewers they've gotten new features you know perform javascript and web viewer uh stuff like that so yeah let's um uh let's take a look at some of the stuff you've built and talk about like how long it take to build and what the process is like to maintain it sure so i'm going to share my desktop okay can you see my desktop yep
okay uh so uh let's move this looks like maybe the grand canyon there oh yeah it is uh let's start with um um let's start with this not with this or this so this is a very interesting this is the first um situation where this is an ios file maker go up i don't know i'll try to to make it bigger yeah another thing you can do with zoom it's actually really good is rather than sharing a whole desktop there's an advanced thing that says share this is a good little tip for everybody who uses zoom um there's a thing that says share portion of screen it's on the advanced so okay yeah and then what it does is it shows you can draw like a little box and then everything within the box from all applications go inside so it's better than sharing an application and better than sharing a desktop there you go and then you can make that box bigger and then everything is really really easy to read yeah yeah that's great yeah so we're going to go ahead and take a look at right now we're seeing a really zoomed in version of the of the app anyway yeah i'm just trying to make to make it portrait um what can i so that's the green you can't so the green box that comes up
you can grab an edge and move it around and then you can grab like the bottom right corner to make it bigger and smaller ah that's great okay yeah that's it yeah yeah there you go that's portrait now okay great that's great yeah because it also solves the issue with uh model windows the card windows which they don't come up when you share a screen exactly so uh this is a great example this is for a beer factory uh it's their crm system so we had a layout uh for sites so sites are places where people uh come on i can not click ah yeah great so there are places where the beer uh gets um consumed and what kind of consumption there is and uh flying information v80 number etc who is the lead etc so what we're looking at is the first actually uh vibe coded this was um maybe more than a year ago i remember it it was uh last december so things weren't great uh ai wise but then so this looks like filemaker
out of the gate it doesn't look like it was yeah which i think is what you're aiming at maybe i don't know i mean it's just basically good design yeah yeah so the whole thing um came as a as a necessity so the original um not this one i would came to we got to this one the original design was this this was the original design yeah that's your basic filemaker there a portal and a yeah so this is a problem here view with a portal on the bottom yeah so the problem here was that on the on the on filemaker code on people's on users file a mobile device they would have this bad experience of scrolling here then the portal scrolls and then they you can't use the portal with filemaker go it doesn't work yeah so the way to do this in filemaker go would be to have a a top navigation part and a list view that's the only way i do it anyway yeah and then you don't get it you don't get the bottom part like you have here you don't get the sections like you want at all uh yeah yeah which i'm sure is exactly what you already know about so that was uh so people were complaining that okay works great but um the ui is not
helpful it's not intuitive you have all those portals coming yeah if you tap on the wrong spot it scrolls either in a portal or the whole screen it's very very hard i can see that yeah and and also you and me we know what to tap and what we don't need to talk but a user doesn't know when you know we need to train the user yeah not to be critical but there was actually a way to develop this in filemaker that would have solved the problem uh you wouldn't be able to do in one layout that wouldn't have any of those issues yeah of course there are definitely ways to uh walk around yeah but what i love about this is that you've got the the very expected behavior of the long screen because that's what people that's what websites are all like these days not all but yes and ios applications as well yeah exactly yeah and then when you tap on a section it scrolls to that section rather than going to like a whole other layout anyway yeah continue uh so we also have here a uh set console situation so when you click on edit there is a record locking situation and then when you the the technique where the on record commit is exited with false so it blocks filemaker from committing the record so this is another reason uh we always have safe council so this is one of the reasons
we don't do list view um because safe council works on one record base so uh it wouldn't be ideal anyway and we have a lot of functionality when you click that save a lot of things happen and yeah and this is a personal architectural preference of course but i think that's does that mean all these fields are global fields up on the top there no all those fields are proper fields um well then you're directly editing data so what does save do yeah let's just cancel well anyway we don't need to go into that but yeah no so cancel just reverts the record so if i change this but it only reverts the record if you're still in the field if you click out of it it will not revert it to what it was before no it will because there is a script here which uh doesn't allow uh committing oh i see it just goes to this is why yeah okay yeah and if you click cancel it reverts the whole record and in this case it also goes out i haven't done it that way i like that so yeah yeah actually uh this was my topic on clies and gates the the online version
um so back to back to the layout those were the challenges yeah and obviously uh if you're if you have the same preference with technical technical preference with me now that everything needs to be on a single save uh so yeah it's a bit big challenge so the solution to that was uh this file maker ui so this is a web viewer one web viewer for everything so if we go to layout mode you see yeah yeah yeah yeah okay and then yeah so there's no web viewer code here in the web viewer itself you've got the javascript code elsewhere yeah and what this uh property say to the web viewer is that i want the side sites for web viewer and i want the sites for web viewer and i want the sites for my phone view the layout and the script is that you need to interact with is the itapi we in this case we had one script called itapi that just takes it up payload and returns the result very simple okay um and you get and then we got that uh ios feeling uh thing which scrolls magnificently
you can see how nicely yeah it's great it expands yeah it expands correctly uh if you still get your save well actually you have edit so you've got one level beyond that right you haven't like in filemaker if you have an edit button you kind of have to decide is it going to go to a whole other layout is it going to go to another tab panel what's it going to do to show the fields that are editable versus only browsable and obviously you've solved that problem with uh and then save cancel yeah in this situation the client would wanted separate views separate layouts and i i didn't want separate layouts technically because it would be uh to me it's technical that if you have one viewing and one editing whenever you are the field you need to add it in both i don't enjoy doing that no so uh what we have here is it's actually very interesting because this edapi is sourced from this layout which is the edit layout and so if another field is placed uh the web viewer will have access to it maybe it's not yeah probably it's not going to be um you know coded to be working well if you make a new field in the
table then of course you have to link that in the javascript i'm not sure if that's what you were saying but but i'll show you a situation where uh i'm passing a json to the to to web code i say this is a field value feed value so whatever you comes up you add it so uh and edit is again uh file maker this is file maker but each section is separate we don't have any uh interesting okay so your so your edit view is not still file maker it's still farming so it's actually not uh uh in javascript that's interesting i would not have guessed that i would have thought that you would have all the editing done directly in javascript because then you solve the problem of like your value list that you're clicking into right now that don't really kind of work like you want yeah um and then yeah i see the other the other tool you're using here is absolutely the way i would have done it which is a slider panel um because it gives you all of those controls but frankly if it were if it were today i would probably do it everything in web here because remember this was done uh uh almost two years ago where ai wasn't that great this was you don't you didn't have cloud
code you didn't have open ai codecs this was just me uh doing um html css javascript and sure having chat zpt on the side and getting code and playing with it it wasn't as good as it is now one yeah so show me show me something that you that is more modern if you've got something that you've done yeah i mean i've been working on a a pet project like mad for the last several days um uh not final maker at all just a huge website and entirely coded with with uh claude actually uh claude and uh chad d54 and two different things both contributing and fighting and verifying each other on the nice i'll show that on a future podcast the ai uh currency right yeah i think this is how they market it so you're having different agents uh having a council of no you you need to do it like this and coming up with a better so kind of like that it's a you know one's a creator and one's a verifier uh and then uh yeah they're both actually doing it's a huge research project so they're both actually spending hours and hours and hours crunching and testing and analyzing it's not just like push a button built a website uh where the
whole project's done in an hour this is you know probably going to end up being hundreds if not a thousand hours of ai crunching yeah so here we have the first uh project we um we delivered which is solely by coded ui yeah yeah yeah and i love it this also looks like you could have done it in filemaker right even though in other words it's really familiar ui yeah um everything is vibe coded actually the tables the table creation was almost five coded because after creating the initial prototype i asked claude to give me csv exports of all the sample data and then i just imported the sample data and created uh yeah new tables so people miss the fact that you can import a table let's find the csv uh okay no not my axis keys please let's do csv in downloads uh yeah it doesn't matter so yeah then when you have that import you can use
new table and you if you select these names yep field names only one field yeah because this is just a loss basically okay but what what i did here is i told claude give me one csv per table and then i came here and using that feature of filemaker the new table i just created all tables or fields and sample records in you know five ten minutes so and also after that i had to basically yeah this is what i really wanted to see as a relationship graph so yeah the extra barrier was that after creating the tables i had to set up the uids which i usually use the get uid but the uh the sample data was using serial numbers and they had this abbreviation which stripe uses it and i thought it would be nice to know from the uid what's the table and i said okay let's give it a try i generally don't try anything but that's that's a common thing that i've seen it doesn't break right so if you've got
a text in a number field it doesn't get indexed but it does get displayed yeah so and the relationship graph is this dead simple no relationships just a bunch of yeah a bunch of base fields yeah yeah that's crazy uh yeah i love that yeah and what what you will eventually discover is that if you have file maker with stored tables in terms of fields like max 100 fields like max max so if your tables are sort and not oh is it uh the term actually yeah and you don't have relationships you don't have layouts you don't have all this file maker is a great database it might not be a post-credit as maria db performance but it's very close so for example you get one and also deployment matters and usually file maker server is a better deployment than uh super base yeah so this is one of the things i really wondered is why you would use filemaker in the equation as opposed to super base or you know postgres or whatever um yeah the reason is that um i if i need to do
something beyond um i can use filemaker i'll show you here an example of what is beyond i do deployments filemaker i know how to manage everything in filemaker the pipeline deployment all the devops i own it security yeah i love that the whole thing is one file you can you you can encrypt it you know what it is as a file maker developer it's extremely i don't know if i want to say comfortable but for me it feels like a physical thing that i can hold in my hand whereas if it's uh whereas if it's like a you know another like a super base entirely cloud hosted um i don't get that feeling i don't know for me that's that's important the security benefits you get are are to be uh it's unbelievable actually because all the packages so you're using npm packages and you don't know what dependencies you have and just a couple of days ago uh two days ago there was a major breach in npm access package which is the instance from url for javascript so basically someone did something
that it's called the supply chain um exploit what it really means that every this hacker could have we has access to all the machines that use um the version that was um millions of yeah potential but here the the the code the this package the malicious package is in a field and it gets in a web viewer when deployed and the worst thing it can happen is um actually i don't know what the worst thing it can happen well i mean there actually has been a demonstrated other tools that can directly hack filemaker databases um i but uh claris did patch that but there was a period of time where there was a there was a malicious tool that was demonstrated that could that could basically get into any filemaker database that was hosted online um so you know everything has its period of vulnerability that then gets patched comes out and then it gets patched and then it gets patched and then it gets patched and then it gets patched and then it gets patched and then it's like oh my god i'm so scared about what's coming with future versions of ai the next version of claude for example um uh is so powerful that um it's gonna be it could be easily used to as a hacking tool so they've released it to cyber security firms first to use ai to harden their systems uh so that to make it harder uh for the hackers to get in yeah this is why this is why the cyber security uh cv
uh issues that have opened the last year are maybe double than normal that's why this happens so security wise file maker the web code is contained in a web viewer there are not a lot of things that can do so worst thing let's say that uh sensitive data can be sent to someone that's the most critical thing that can happen it cannot but but it cannot hack all your entire system it cannot uh do a hosted situation with encrypted files it cannot do anything and file making is a single point of friction so you have one thing this thing is maintained by clarice and this thing won't break you don't have a hundred of dependencies as you do have in web code yeah that's kind of the other thing that i that i would say i think maybe i've talked about on the podcast before is if you use a full ai system with all that with all elements of it being modern-ish or whatever you know uh ai tools it has to be constantly maintained because engines like php and other things like that when they come out with a new version it
breaks the previous stuff they don't have any problem breaking it filemaker claris will not break previous solutions the last time they did a break was from six to seven and that was back in the 1960s i think not that long ago yeah i think uh someone said i don't remember who but filemaker is probably the only uh tool in the technology industry that has maintained backwards compatibility that hard yeah yeah there's no tool doing uh it's crazy yeah you can you can you know if you have all the versions of filemaker in place you can take like a filemaker 3 database or fp3 or whatever from a really long time ago and convert it and run it and have it work yeah a few weird things the today function some stuff like that but yeah it'll uh it'll it'll just work you know the way that it used to work pretty much yeah so um this one uh one uh prompt was very close to what we wanted it to be it's very close to what we wanted very close to what we needed and the second prompt was to get this table to work so basically the the normal data table that most file making developers do is just load all the data
and have javascript to quick sorting yeah which is very fast and blah blah blah great but in this situation i i didn't want to do that because i have a lot of things loaded i have a lot of things loading so i wanted pagination so a lot of pagination and to do so the sorting needs to happen on the server not on the client so this is why when you click sort you have the web you're asking for filemaker to give back uh a found set of sorted data yeah because because of the pagination and also if you search someone if you search for alexanderos you'll see that the driver is going to do the search because we don't want to display all the data here right um uh well you have to take a look at my new fm search results stuff for search it's next level ai search anyway i have i'll do i promise so uh that was the second part and then just tweaks so um here's my brother you can edit uh select here you can do whatever you want when you click save
everything goes back in file maker and everything is there yeah so you have a potential issue of a record um i wouldn't say record locking but like another user could go make an edit to the record more quickly than you you could open it let's say that you do have that actually let's do the whole pipeline let's say that some with some other means or service we come here and we create uh matt navar it's uh it's matthias navadakis my great name so you have the you have some other means an api or another layout if i make a layout creating a new record now you come here when you go when you come back uh it will after some seconds it's going to load again and matthews is going to be there uh i i created you when we did our demo so let's say now that someone is here locking the record so right now i'm blocking the record here right which means that if i do a change here i'll have an issue right yeah okay let's see how nicely this
issue will work so i'll click save changes you're actually allowed to save it by making an operation failed yeah an error and i do i don't just get an error the user got an error and i will also get the error in my sentry feed so this is my project contacts demo i'm going to refresh i'll get an email of the of the issue in just a matter of seconds come on don't don't blow it to me the law of demos yeah yeah so the error gets sent when when there's a so this is a pretty simple error right this is a really basic uh commit error and as this is also assuming that you have a user with direct access to filemaker where they can actually lock a record for a period of time with a web interface the user can't do that right they do a load so it's a typical transaction situation they they load the record in a tiny fraction of a second and set a flag that they're loading it they're using it and then when they run
the record it tests to see if the original is the same as the original writes it commits it and then goes on and if there's an error then you know the transaction process kind of kind of kicks in exactly another user did it or or another user just can't check it out if they're actually in edit mode you know they can't this is another user's editing yeah so the the error didn't come through uh i'll take a look a bit but i have a mock error situation and flag which i deployed right now so basically mock fail yeah nice there was another thing that we talked about that i'm dying to discuss um related to the error i'll see if i can describe it and then oh yeah i see you get dashboard and you'll get uh the error right here so you get an email of the error you you get the the the file make it that api thing yeah you'll get everything so what we're looking at just for the people and look at that look at that sorry matt just this is really magnificent yeah it's cool i don't even know how you did that so basically what you're tracking and showing is considerably more information than the user even than the actual data stores so you're you're
storing you know all of this stuff but we just showed us like a video showing exactly where the user went around how the hell are you logging that i'm not doing that it's sensory oh okay it's sensory but what i i do log if i if i so um let me take you to the next step so we build the functionality everything works great and now we're moving to k we need to test it so how do we test it uh that's i think the fate my favorite part of all these vibe coded experiences is so uh there is a script by the way this is a script of all this solution there's a deployment which initializes some things uh the build sorry initializes uh some serials just yeah for my sake of using the prefix serials and yeah a startup script driver this js driver which is the the the interaction script to get and write and all but everything work with execute file making that api so the web here just yeah the web gear just needs to to send the execute file making that api right that's all it needs to do and and we have some uh parts where
we can also ask to run a script before and after this is an inspiration from file making that api basically and last we have a log global variable which is which comes very handy to what i'm saying now we have a log script uh it's a sweet it's a toggling script you click it once it opens a file you click it twice it it stops it so i'm going to start my log and this is how we are doing testing we start the application uh everything loaded we came here uh we click on mod we click edit uh special the file maker evangelist is that correct source let's say linkedin save and we're going to come here and do everything so create a company we know data industry um whatever um blah blah blah everything we'll we'll we'll do all every operation that yeah you're doing a search and after we do all that we do every operation by testing we stop the log and
then we open the we just open the log and see what we got here it is a complete api log of input output yeah to the js driver so so this is the js driver one or the the uh filemaker data call or it's the js driver so this is the js driver logging what it got as an input and what its speed it's spits spot as an output so this is it so you requested this i gave you this you requested this i gave you this right and so on and basically you can throw that in say yeah do i have any issues it's as simple as that it's all it's it's as close as automated tested testing you can go in filemaker well i'd say you can go one step further because now with with uh with with claude uh co-work you can actually have it you know you could write a a prompt and have it actually go control the database and filemaker and do a bunch
of stuff um rather than you doing it and you know you can have it click buttons and it try to make errors and blah blah blah yeah yeah it would be um and lastly we had a request to scan the business card and there are also other projects that um they are a combination of file maker um for example if you need to do back-end api calls you cannot do them directly from the web viewer due to course issues uh you'll need to do it from url from your file maker and make the whole thing work for example here we have a scan business card uh function here we have a scan business card uh function here we have a scan business card uh function here we have a scan business card uh function here we have a scan business card uh function here we have a scan business card uh function here we have a scan business card uh function here we have a scan business card that i don't have a business card that i don't have a business card that i don't have a business card but i'll just search for the pins if i but i'll just search for the pins if i but i'll just search for the pins if i nobody has business cards anymore stop this nobody has business cards anymore stop this nobody has business cards anymore stop this yeah yeah yeah anyway people know anyway people know anyway people know i'll just use a screenshot i'll just use a screenshot i'll just use a screenshot yeah so this makes an api call then yeah yeah so this makes an api call then yeah yeah so this makes an api call then yeah from filemaker yeah uh not uh yeah uh not yeah uh not really an api call it's uh really an api call it's uh really an api call it's uh it's the same thing it's the same thing it's the same thing yeah but this is going to happen in
yeah but this is going to happen in yeah but this is going to happen in filemaker filemaker filemaker so it's going to create the record it's so it's going to create the record it's so it's going to create the record it's going to create the going to create the going to create the the container yeah okay and then it's the container yeah okay and then it's the container yeah okay and then it's then it's going to to run the script then it's going to to run the script then it's going to to run the script yeah so i see what's happening is you're yeah so i see what's happening is you're yeah so i see what's happening is you're stepping through stepping through stepping through and make it you're not in five you're and make it you're not in five you're and make it you're not in five you're in your world you can do whatever you in your world you can do whatever you in your world you can do whatever you want to your ocr want to your ocr want to your ocr well filemaker doesn't have native ocr well filemaker doesn't have native ocr well filemaker doesn't have native ocr so you've you've used regular filemaker so you've you've used regular filemaker so you've you've used regular filemaker to go to a table create a record to go to a table create a record to go to a table create a record paste the graphic in there but then paste the graphic in there but then paste the graphic in there but then you have to do you have to do you have to do some kind of a call to ocr it some kind of a call to ocr it some kind of a call to ocr it yep uh you have the yep uh you have the yep uh you have the the extract pdf oh i see that's what the extract pdf oh i see that's what the extract pdf oh i see that's what you're using and so that just gets the you're using and so that just gets the you're using and so that just gets the data out of it data out of it data out of it yeah okay so there is correct it right yeah okay so there is correct it right yeah okay so there is correct it right there is actually a way to get text out there is actually a way to get text out there is actually a way to get text out of something of something of something yes but it will not do ocr no right yes but it will not do ocr no right yes but it will not do ocr no right it's just if if it's uh it's just if if it's uh it's just if if it's uh most likely the business card is a most likely the business card is a most likely the business card is a picture which means that your best guess picture which means that your best guess picture which means that your best guess would be either to send it would be either to send it would be either to send it uh to google vision or revision model
uh to google vision or revision model uh to google vision or revision model or just do ocr with mbs using the or just do ocr with mbs using the or just do ocr with mbs using the um the dyna pdf the library um the dyna pdf the library um the dyna pdf the library it's a very simple call to open ai or it's a very simple call to open ai or it's a very simple call to open ai or claude or any of the other call yeah claude or any of the other call yeah claude or any of the other call yeah but if you just need the text mbs but if you just need the text mbs but if you just need the text mbs uh dyna pdf yeah yeah yeah great you uh dyna pdf yeah yeah yeah great you uh dyna pdf yeah yeah yeah great you don't need don't need don't need uh the superpowers well i mean those uh the superpowers well i mean those uh the superpowers well i mean those aren't superpowers that's a aren't superpowers that's a you know that ocr is a very small you know that ocr is a very small you know that ocr is a very small fraction of a penny fraction of a penny fraction of a penny and an almost instantaneous call and an almost instantaneous call and an almost instantaneous call um anyway um anyway um anyway but yeah if you could do it with the but yeah if you could do it with the but yeah if you could do it with the plug-in you know for free then yeah you plug-in you know for free then yeah you plug-in you know for free then yeah you have options you're in file maker you have options you're in file maker you have options you're in file maker you you know what you can do that's the you know what you can do that's the you know what you can do that's the point yeah i get that i get that um point yeah i get that i get that um well i guess with the plug-in it's not well i guess with the plug-in it's not well i guess with the plug-in it's not technically free because you definitely technically free because you definitely technically free because you definitely buy by the way you everybody needs to go buy by the way you everybody needs to go buy by the way you everybody needs to go buy the mbs plugin if you don't already buy the mbs plugin if you don't already buy the mbs plugin if you don't already uh i'd say that's probably even a uh i'd say that's probably even a uh i'd say that's probably even a bigger a bigger thing than uh bigger a bigger thing than uh bigger a bigger thing than uh than auto but yeah they're both kind of than auto but yeah they're both kind of than auto but yeah they're both kind of a must a must a must okay cool yeah see the thing is i think okay cool yeah see the thing is i think okay cool yeah see the thing is i think so you you focused quite a bit and this so you you focused quite a bit and this so you you focused quite a bit and this is why i really wanted to talk to you is why i really wanted to talk to you is why i really wanted to talk to you on on on on using um on using um on using um ai to create a database and to make a ai to create a database and to make a ai to create a database and to make a really beautiful
really beautiful really beautiful user experience user experience user experience that flows really well that's easy to that flows really well that's easy to that flows really well that's easy to maintain maintain maintain um um um that writes data consistently that that that writes data consistently that that that writes data consistently that that focuses on focuses on focuses on using ai within a file maker using ai within a file maker using ai within a file maker application application application so that some function gets called to do so that some function gets called to do so that some function gets called to do something that you can't otherwise do something that you can't otherwise do something that you can't otherwise do so for example the so for example the so for example the fm search results uh fm search results uh fm search results uh ai thing we'll we'll get through any ai thing we'll we'll get through any ai thing we'll we'll get through any misspelling misspelling misspelling in anything in anything in anything in any language and find the record in any language and find the record in any language and find the record that you're looking for that you're looking for that you're looking for stuff i dreamed about when i first read stuff i dreamed about when i first read stuff i dreamed about when i first read fm search results 15 years ago or fm search results 15 years ago or fm search results 15 years ago or whatever whatever whatever or a call that does that business card or a call that does that business card or a call that does that business card scan or a call that creates a graphic scan or a call that creates a graphic scan or a call that creates a graphic or a call that that describes a photo in or a call that that describes a photo in or a call that that describes a photo in a really consistent way a really consistent way a really consistent way or a call that you know uh writes that or a call that you know uh writes that summarizes something or runs a report or creates a little widget or all of those things are the things that i've i've got a big tool chest of them and clearly you're going to be using some of those here as well but that's anyway i'm just kind of saying we're coming at this from two approaches which i really love yeah and you know with your approach you can uh have something that's again
spits the results as html so there's web viewer again okay either comes back as text uh job uh text you know json or html pretty much just those right i think that's i think that's the next step that's the next step i'm thinking and exploring and uh basically working in my head instead of having a but this is going to be exploratory the vibe coded up we are seeing here is a perfectly deliverable app because it has been tested it it's a built it's not going to change we use vibe we use ai to build it we tested it it's not it's not going to change but you do also have uh the ability to to say to the ai i need a report this is the data from file maker create a ui for me and ai will give you the html code to view it in a web viewer so you don't have a ui you just basically tell ai give me the ui to display this so it doesn't need to be pre-agreed predefined pre-built exactly can be whatever it needs to be for that query that problem we shouldn't have left it for the end but there's something else that we talked about that i think is completely amazing
and that is um this this lens itself and i think you showed me a little bit of like an auto heal type of a thing right so to describe it what you ted uh showed me and then you can correct i'm wrong um certain types of errors that might happen let's say for example you add a field or edit a field or delete a field from uh like the address so like if maybe it has address line one address line two and you go that's really stupid we're just gonna have one field um that when that particular type of error happens and it gets logged in the thing that you showed me that ai can then analyze the log find out what's going on with the fields maybe do an mcp call to filemaker and say hey what changed edit the javascript code and deploy the fix without you having to do anything or suggest the fix and you say you know accept that's some next level stuff that you showed me yeah yeah did i get that right yeah you got it uh century uh you know where it was uh okay so we have we have our error so we can connect century which is the the the tool we are using to monitor our javascript
errors we can connect it to our github and where this error occurs it's going to automatically create an issue on github then from github um let's say fm js driver github says repositories fm js driver so on github let's say that an issue opens this is by the way this is by the way the the fmj's driver side of um of the web code so i'm using this it's publicly available available anyone can download it so what this does is after you have done your vibe coding and the ui is ready you tell your ai agent hey uh do npm install fm js driver and check the documentation and connect it to my filemaker backend copy paste the script the js driver script and that's it it will work definitely because i've done it uh dozens of times it works every time and i'm also updating updating it um continuously for example um the sort i added the sort
a couple of weeks ago so i'm maintaining it uh you should expect this to work flawlessly uh let's say an issue comes up so uh there are github has now uh ai agents which can can be co-pilot it can be cloud agent and when a issue is created from sentry an ai agent can start working on that and so if you have in your environment variables the the old data information of your filemaker test environment of course you can have because you can create fields using old data that's something that we miss all data can create a field so this means that it cannot modify a layout though but if i make an upgrade well actually it sort of does right so if you create a field and you're using data api to pull it you still have the layout uh yeah issue uh ian jameson uh recently published a video where he's using the fm upgrade tool to also have ai change the layout yeah well that was our last episode
i don't think but yeah academically and in theory uh you can have all data create the field you can have fm upgrade to put the field in the layout you can have the agent fix the error in the web code and boom yeah so you can really marry the two approaches you have and and like if you're sufficiently insane you know greatly automate what you can do with filemaker uh yeah i would say that there's you know if you're if you haven't really done a lot of ai you've introduced some tools that you really need to get some expertise in we as developers have to learn how to play scales and arpeggios and melodies and stuff like that with tools like sentry.io github um uh obviously claude and figure out the best ways to use them what they can do and what they can't do how they're going to make sense what we want how them to get to do what we want this is not something that you can just push a button and have it done and vibe code it you know to do the things that i've been doing to do the things that i've been doing to do the things that i've been doing to do the things that i've been doing i've been spending a lot of time researching understanding learning and having an absolute fabulous time using tools that i didn't really
want to learn at this phase in my career uh yeah but i'm thrilled now to be to be fully taking advantage of these things um yeah i think my excuse me as a senior developer i think you don't mean that as a senior like senior citizen developer no senior developer like senior property developer yeah yeah the your job shifts to building stuff to knowing what tools exist and pick those tools what do i mean by that so basically what i've been doing the past nine months is every night i watch at least one youtube video i have a lot of subscription i i recommend theo is a is a great five colder that i enjoy uh network chuck is very fun and coffee oriented i have a lot of people i follow in you on youtube and i get tools and i get notified and information about tools and then i do my personal research and i'm always up to date with what tools
exist and i think my job apart aside from file maker if the ai wave is going to win your job is going to know what tools exist so you have the ability to tell claude use century for error on monitoring because claude will not recommend it by default use vercel to deploy use super base or use vercel neon database or use file maker you still need to decide that's our job and that's always going to be our job the human job what you need to do crafting the requirements that's never going to change and testing never going to change what has changed is the in between you have a great tool an ai agent doing the work for you you don't need to know web development at all you like nothing but you need to know which tools the ai agent needed to use that's your job yeah i don't know i think i think i mostly agree with that um and i i think i probably
would have fought you on don't need to know web development at all maybe a month or two ago but i think i have to agree now that it's especially working on this huge project that i've been doing there's well not huge but certainly big um the reliability with which it can write html and python and do queries and do all this automation and come with the correct results is really really high but it still absolutely needs a human to like hey say hey this isn't right there should be you know three thousand of those and it's not going to work it's going to work it's going to work it's not 1600 and then ai would go oh yeah you're right i forgot to look at x um yeah it's definitely a nice to have uh understanding the code that is being written of course but it's not a must-have and must-have is to be able to craft compose proper requirements in a markdown file properly written properly broken down that's most important more important than understanding the code if you also understand the code that's the you know the best you can get but yeah but i mean you can also use ai to help you to look at the code summarize it you know as
a tool to understand the code uh yeah yeah this is great any other last things you want to show talk about yeah um i wanted to show you really quickly uh but let's do it in another uh i want to show you so i click the save and the record locking error occurred and it didn't get uh logged on sentry um next time we'll show how we're going to fix that so it's not going to be uh you know nuclear physics i'm just going to open closer say i click save the error didn't be get logged you're not handling the error uh on save to be sent to sentry and it's going to do it then i'm going to commit it uh and deploy it that's it but yeah um i'm happy to do it now if you want to well we i i'm not sure how long that would take we i think we kind of talked that exact thing through a minute ago yeah yeah yeah okay you can cut it in the montage if you want well i mean i want to save some of this too are you going to be making like a video we're talking about this at conferences
you're going to which conferences will you be at this year engage you hmm i i i have not decided yet what i'm going to do yeah engage you as a must if you're in europe and gosh a super important one if you're in the us uh or anywhere um that's the largest conference in europe it'll be in malmo this year uh it changes between momo and antwerp right goes back and forth are you going to uh vienna calling vienna calling no uh i'd love to join uh but basically my family obligations dictate that i would only join one and then otherwise yes got it you know in greece we call it the sleeper you know yeah so basically yeah the sleeper though you know the the the sleeper is basically when we say the sleeper in greek we say that your wife is going to take the sleeper and hit youtube oh my god i got it yeah yeah the metaphor basically that you're putting a lot of pressure on your wife and you're not helping enough unless
she has to take the care of the kids and whatnot yeah yeah uh but yeah i would love to go to vienna and uh if clarice and gates us uh takes place uh i'll try to to to be there as well yeah but engage you are not uh i i love the the setup the crowd it's a great level it's it's a great balance of expertise and regular stuff yeah social so technical so for example.fmp the past was you know i remember a session not understanding anything where someone explained uh it was we were looking at binary ascii code and how yeah how to exploit how he came how to exploit the user the credentials login you know that's way too technical yeah i'm doing a session on assembler no i'm not that goes all the way back to the very beginning we're talking steve wozniak days it's it's always like that matt when you when you it's the beginning i think
it's a quote from harry potter when he opens the the golden states is snitch states i don't remember though yeah uh i i end when you start something like that yeah yeah it's the circle it's everything in the circle it's a circle of life so it all comes down to where you're started and ai is now at the start so it's you know i think that everyone uh should jump in the wave they might not um get to the point where they deliver by coded up like that but they definitely need to pay to play it's almost free yeah stop sharing your screen for a second let's like do a quick little summary here um i i'll make one other editorial i think that i think that um some filemaker databases maybe many filemaker databases don't really need ai and they don't they don't really need to be replaced by ai they're just doing the job for the organization and the company which hasn't changed in 15 years and ai is not really going to affect that industry and so they can continue using it for the rest of their lives and i think that's a really important part of the
next 15 years or whatever i think that's i'm not really um i haven't really done an analysis but i kind of looked at all the customers i've done work for in the last decades and there's a good number of them in that situation but i also think within that group that there's little widgets that can be added there's there's ai can be can make the experience richer without really changing anything about what that database does um and then there's other industries where the whole application can and should be replaced by a by an approach like what you're what you just showed um because it because it's an industry or because it's a uh growing or changing or because the customer wants to do something that you can't do easily in filemaker um yeah so i think there's kind of a you know it's a spectrum i also think that for some filemaker developers it's kind of a it's a spectrum i also think that for some filemaker developers it's kind of a it's a spectrum i also think that for some uh i don't know if i would say based on their age or based on their proximity to retirement whatever you know maybe could be interested in watch ai but maybe don't need to throw themselves into it uh i think everybody
should but i think that you know i wouldn't i wouldn't say it's a blanket statement um there are definitely things that won't change a database still needs to accommodate and hold and save data safely ai won't say exactly uh it might give it some uh nice things to have like you said but the actual way to get the necessity of yeah yeah a different way to get the data necessity yeah the necessity of what it needs to do right get the data in get the data out and the method to do that might be completely different you know maybe in the future we'll just put our finger to our forehead and think for a second and the data will go in um and then whoever needs to get the data will see it on the inside of their glasses and so they'll know that a record was changed or whatever and there's something they're supposed to do you know that who knows where we're going with that but um yeah cool thanks for your time thanks for having me it was great having this podcast together we did a good job not speaking too much great to each other yep and next time we'll get some other people that have never used ai and we can build a file maker vibe coded up together oh yeah
yeah we talked about doing that yeah we talked about doing that um but just starting the podcast with nothing and then having an app be done by the time we're done with it yeah that's that's definitely an idea um that'd be a really good session at a conference too yeah powerful all right thank you sir thank you matt have a great day