Airtable is arguably one of the most influential product launches in the past ten years. What started as an alternative to spreadsheets quickly turned into a new way for makers and companies to quickly build apps without the need for code. Just take a look at the no-code category on Product Hunt, and you’ll see hundreds of apps using Airtable as a database.
Now, the Airtable team is back with another launch that aims to make it even easier for users to build whatever app they need. No points for guessing that it’s AI. Cobuilder uses OpenAI’s GPT-4 family of models to handle all the heavy lifting of building apps within Airtable. What used to take potentially hours can now be done in minutes.
It works by quickly analyzing the user’s role, the company they work for, and their specific prompt to make a number of API calls to a large-language model. For example, I could tell Airtable that I write the Product Hunt newsletter, and it could pull in data from the homepage about interesting products to write about.
From there, it generates an app for a specific use case while adding specific features based on your profile. Once the app is generated, you can customize it further by changing the styling, updating the data, or adding features like a calendar, dashboard, gallery, etc.
Cobuilder isn’t Airtable’s first foray into AI—the company added a number of AI features to its app-building capabilities last year and updated them as early as this March—but this is the team’s first attempt at incorporating AI into every step of the building process.