AI-First Attitude Adjustment

Developers who adopt AI-first mindfulness will run circles around their colleagues.

I recently saw a new feature request to add a formula to a platform that would proper-case names. Proper case, also known as title case functions, capitalize the first character in each word token irrespective of naming formats.

This is especially important when trying to format names such as “Bill van der Made”, and doing so correctly in databases, legal documents, or email correspondence matters greatly.

Most developers immediately jump to the code they know, reaching for regular expressions and then trying to anticipate the hundreds of possible edge cases that could trip them up.

I’m lazy. This is what I want to avoid.



This is a coding shit show.

Name formats are all about text. Names are entities, and LLMs are trained with text and understand entities quite well. LLMs have seen every name and entity format imaginable.

What if we handed this entire problem domain over to an LLM?

Solved!



Read how

Yes, Regex is one of the main losers with LLMs becoming widely available — in two ways: 1. No human needs to write Regex anymore (ChatGPT gets most of my Regexes at first try) 2. Why use a Regex in the first place if you can just get the right result with the LLM directly :smiley:

RegEx is one of many code pathways to fundamentally change the underlying dependencies on rigid design choices.

This is why Airtable should change how formulas are implemented. They successfully democratized data management. Now they need to democratize the very nature of formulas.

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