ClarisTalk AI

Live from EngageU in Malmö, Sweden.

Javier and Matt have a tradition: They sit down at the end of every conference and compare notes. This one was three days of pretty much nothing but AI 

We talk about the agentic development tools Claris showed, and what it means to drive FileMaker from a prompt: layouts, themes from your website's CSS, scripts, documentation, data. Javier thinks we won't code anymore. I think we will, we'll just be reading it more than typing it.

Then the question he put to me: are we ready to give a brand new customer a solution where the whole interface lives in a web viewer? My answer is "sort of", and I explain where I'd draw the line (web viewer to read and look good, a FileMaker card window the moment the user does something).

Also: why a regular FileMaker layout is starting to look a little old, why we need to know more about AI than our customers do, AI hype in Spain, and CodeWave, the Spanish-language FileMaker conference Javier is putting on in Madrid, April 9 and 10, 2027. English speakers welcome.

Chapters
0:00 Are you Spanish today?
0:25 Three days of AI
1:20 The agentic development tools
3:19 "We will not code anymore"
4:18 Old files, new standards
5:35 Web viewer interfaces
6:01 Pythia, and what lives outside FileMaker
7:05 A whole solution in a web viewer?
8:42 "It looks a little bit old"
9:18 Mitos: fast search with a Greek name
10:56 AI that makes sense for the customer
12:20 How was EngageU?
13:22 Having the Claris people in the room
14:58 Is AI over-hyped?
16:31 CodeWave, Madrid, April 2027

Live from EngageU in Malmö, Sweden.
Weird little coincidence: Jesse Barnum of 360Works and I both just shipped a logging tool for FileMaker. We didn't talk to each other first. So we sat down and compared notes.
Jesse's is Layout Logger, a plug-in he first wrote in 2008 and just dusted off. Think Google Analytics for FileMaker: which layouts people use, which scripts they run, what version they're on, where they connect from. You drop one file on the server, add a line to your startup script, and that's it. Then you hand the logs to Claude and ask it who's doing what. (You can even spot people sharing passwords.)
Mine is Clio. It logs data changes to a little sidecar server, lets you ask your logs questions in plain English, and has rules that can tell you when something DIDN'T happen.
Completely different approaches to two different problems. So of course we spent half the time working out how to marry them up.
Also in here: OnWindowTransaction and where it bites, why the last 5% of an AI build takes so long, a good story about checking the AI's work, and why we both think what Claris showed at the keynote is a big deal.

Chapters
0:00 Four things you're about to hear
0:21 Two logging tools, one coincidence
0:46 Layout Logger, since 2008
1:56 Google Analytics for FileMaker
3:03 How it works: 20 times a second
3:49 Install: one file, one script line
6:05 Go, WebDirect, and a bug report
7:17 The boring way and the cool way
8:55 Who's sharing passwords?
9:14 An idea Jesse writes down
10:42 Matt's turn: from FMLog to Clio
12:43 A sidecar on Fly.io
13:54 Rules, and things that don't happen
15:43 OnWindowTransaction, warts and all
20:00 Ask your logs
20:52 Marrying the two tools
23:19 Open source, and the last 5%
24:10 Midjourney and D&D
25:22 Eight logs, one timeline
26:55 Trust, but verify
27:56 Checking the AI's work
30:07 Two models check each other
31:24 Claude Code today
32:04 Bigger than FileMaker 7

Layout Logger: 360works.com
Clio: navarre.ai

Live from EngageU in Malmö, Sweden. Episode 2 of 3.

Two conversations from the last day of the conference.

First up: Joris Aarts. He runs EngageU along with Johan Hedman (They make it look easy, which it isn't). Fifty new attendees this year. Pretty much every session was about AI, and the few speakers who opened with "no AI" got applause. We talk about what the panel changed my mind on, why this feels like the iPad era all over again, and next year in Antwerp. He says 300 people. Matt says 400. Americans: Dust off your passports.

Then Jay Sayers from Skeleton Key, at his first EngageU. We'd both just walked out of a security session that scared me a little (I do AI all day and understood a scary small percentage of it). Jay talks about why Skeleton Key went slow on AI, what "AI in the process" means compared to AI that writes your code, and the customer who walked in saying "We need AI" and walked out with no AI at all. And why FileMaker's security model is something we shouldn't take for granted.

Stick around to the end for one-sentence stories.

Chapters
0:00 Three things you're about to hear
0:17 Joris Aarts: fifty new faces
2:05 AI all day, and applause for "no AI"
2:27 Making it look easy
4:15 The panel, and AI for the sake of AI
5:02 Remember the iPad era?
5:33 Next year: Antwerp
6:32 Americans, dust off the passport
6:48 300 attendees? 400?
8:08 What you only get in person
8:47 Karaoke
9:50 Jay Sayers, Skeleton Key
11:22 The security session
14:58 A cautious first AI project
17:17 FileMaker's security model
21:23 "We need AI"
23:27 One-sentence stories

Next week: Matt & Jesse Barnum of 360Works. Logs, logs and more logs.

Live from EngageU in Malmö, Sweden. Episode 1 of 3.

Two years ago Ryan McCann was a brand new CEO and we recorded a podcast. So we did it again, right after a keynote where Claris showed its new agentic development tools and opened sign-ups for the developer preview.

I told him I think this is the biggest change in the life of a FileMaker developer since FileMaker 7. Maybe bigger. Ryan is "cautiously optimistic", and then he says things like "we can take off, but we have to move with urgency." Exciting times.

We get into:

- Why the hard part for a small business is still a production system that runs the business, even though prototyping just got really cheap
- Who the "adult in the room" is when the customer's cousin builds something over a weekend (it's you)
- The fear around AI, and why neither of us spends much time there
- What it's like to build a FileMaker file from a prompt in Claude Code: tables, layouts, scripts, even data
- Ryan turns the tables and interviews me for a few minutes. Sorry about that.
- "You've got to earn it. You've got to prove it." How Claris decides what gets shown on stage
- My name for the new tool, which nobody thinks is funny

Chapters
0:00 Three things you're about to hear
0:27 Two years later
1:05 The biggest change since FileMaker 7?
4:27 What's still hard for small and mid-sized businesses
6:28 The adult in the room
7:58 80% of people don't like AI. Will that pass?
11:44 Building FileMaker from a prompt
13:47 Ryan asks the questions
17:50 Earn it, prove it
19:19 "I have a vision for this company"
20:48 The developer preview, and a bad joke

Recorded at EngageU 2026, Malmö. Next week: Joris Aarts and Jay Sayers.

Vince Menanno, the Chief Innovation Officer at https://beezwax.net shows his latest tool to manage technical debt and help developers manage their FileMaker projects. This is the latest version of this application that so many developers rely on for information about their database.

Who added this script? Who deleted it?
Which objects are unreferenced?
How many dependencies does this object have and where are they? Show me graphically!