Chrysta Bilton

Sunday Calendar Section ✨

This is going to stick with me forever

We're excited to launch 🚀@Airtable AI Assistant 🚀 today, along with AI document analysis and AI web research capabilities! Airtable was founded 12 years ago with the mission of democratizing software creation. Our pioneering innovation was to distill app-building concepts (data, logic, interface) into intuitive visual components, like a no-code lego kit for app building. At the time, we speculated that someday, maybe AI would get good enough to enable conversational app building–talking to an expert AI app builder–and be a huge unlock, making app building even more accessible. We’re now at that point. While surprisingly impressive text generation and manipulation by LLMs was the breakthrough of the 2022 ChatGPT moment, the emergence of surprisingly impressive reasoning capability from LLMs is the breakthrough of 2025. This is unlocking more autonomous agentic experiences, and generating apps and code is the first killer use case (@cursor_ai, @windsurf_ai, @DevinAI, @v0, @boltdotnew, @Replit Agent to name a few). But for the large class of non-technical builders, a different approach is needed. When AI generates apps with code, rather than no-code building blocks, it requires a developer to fully understand how they work – and to verify them for hidden mistakes that would be tricky/impossible to debug by interface inspection alone (it may look right, but what is the data model business logic is flawed in non-obvious ways?). Airtable Assistant is an agent that can build and modify Airtable apps through conversation, changing schemas, adding automations, and designing interfaces. You can ask it to do things like: –“Research every conference attendee in this base” to have the Assistant immediately spin up an army of researchers that pull in background information for your attendees –“Analyze each contract to identify key risks they pose to my business” to have the Assistant add an AI field that runs an analysis at scale for each contract you’ve signed. Airtable Assistant can also answer questions about the data in your apps, like prompts as advanced as: –“I'm about to meet Jane Smith at Zelos, read all of their recent sales call transcripts and tell me how far along they are in their implementation and if they’re dealing with any issues” –“What are the most common risk factors in our contracts? Are there any changes to our default posture we might consider?” Credit to @mikeyk for introducing us to the concept of low floor and high ceiling in HCI many years ago, which has become part of our internal lexicon for thinking about product improvements. Assistant dramatically lowers the floor to building apps, including more sophisticated ones, by helping human builders translate their business requirements into the schema design, logic, and interfaces required to deliver on the use case. In addition to launching Airtable Assistant today, we’re also releasing the capability to deploy thousands of AI web researchers, and AI document analysts, to continuously work on the data in Airtable apps. You can do things like: –Pull strategy and value stories from every product requirement doc to draft launch and release messaging –Monitor all brand mentions across digital channels to measure campaign impact –Create an automatically updating competitive intelligence dossier with the latest news and messaging from every competitor in your industry Check it out 👇

Dwayne Johnson, Author: Crown Publishing Nabs True-Life, Hawaii-Set Crime Book Co-Written with Nick Bilton (Exclusive) hollywoodreporter.com/business/busin…

So proud and excited for my incredibly talented, hardworking husband @nickbilton to be working with this amazing team🦈🩸

Some totally wild personal news... I'm writing a movie for Martin Scorsese (!) starring the brilliant Dwayne Johnson, Emily Blunt and Leo DiCarprio.

I don’t think I’ve watched a video of these fires that has captured the meaning of home so completely. Pray for these people. 💙

Get ready for BIGGEST HEIST EVER, a crazy, insane, bats**t story about Bitcoin Bonnie & Clyde, the couple behind the biggest financial seizure in U.S. history. It'll be on @netflix on December 6th.

Want to write thrilling stories? Nick Bilton has the playbook. He's written for Netflix and The New York Times, and this episode is a tell-all class on how to create tension with hooks, cliffhangers, drama, and conflict. Highlights below: 1. Evil characters only work if readers care about them. 2. The best way to make readers care about an evil character is to humanize them. You can do that by focusing on simple details like how they lose their keys. Or, you can write about their mother because every murderer has a mother who loves them. 3. You can't look down on your characters. You have to look out with them. 4. Rule for writing screenplays: Get into the scene as late as you can, and get out of it as early as you can. 5. Fiction stories have the opposite shape as non-fiction ones. 6. In fiction, the kicker comes at the beginning and the summary comes at the end. In non-fiction, the summary comes at the beginning and the kicker comes at the end. 7. How’d Nick learn to tell better stories? By reading murder mysteries. 8. If the story's good enough, the book will fly off the shelves. Look at the Twilight series. The books sold like crazy even though the writing stinks. 9. How do you write good cliffhangers? Show people a little bit of the future, but don't reveal everything. 10. Ask the question at the end of one chapter and answer it shortly after. The answer doesn't need to come right away, but you have to answer it soon. 11. There are two kinds of stories that work: Big ones about something small, and small ones about something big. Stories in the middle are usually terrible. 12. Nick once asked the legendary journalist David Carr for advice. The response: “Keep typing until it turns into writing.” 13. You can tell a good story without knowing everything that happened, but you do need to know enough to make the reader feel like they're there. 14. Writers often over-describe their scenes. You only need three details. For example, if you're at a campground, you might only need the sight of the pine needles on the ground, the smell of a nearby campfire, and the sound of crickets in the distance. 15. We admire characters more for trying than their successes (this is rule #1 in Pixar's 22 Rules of Storytelling). That's just a little taste of what's in this episode with @nickbilton. You can watch the full thing below. If you'd rather watch on YouTube or listen on Spotify or Apple, and I've shared those links in the reply tweets.

Amazing story from @alexrkonrad on an incredible entrepreneur (and dear friend) @howietl cc: tip @Techmeme

@semaforben @nayeema @maxwelltani @alli_rodgers @ahaburchak So exciting!! 🎉👌

So excited about this: @nayeema & I will be co-hosting Mixed Signals from Semafor Media -- a new podcast on media as it intersects politics, culture, technology. @maxwelltani producing and reporting for the show, w @alli_rodgers @ahaburchak Subscribe here: link.chtbl.com/6X2V2kxZ

4 intriguing memoirs explore the nature of family secrets. @mohsinzaidi_ldn @LaSeletzky @chrystabilton @backbaybooks @VintageAnchor @AlgonquinBooks @counterpointLLC bookpage.com/?p=202227

your girl won the national jewish book award for debut fiction!

Scoop: Letterboxd, the go-to social network for film nerds, has sold a majority stake in a deal that values the service at more than $50 million nytimes.com/2023/09/29/bus…

@miyadavid Hi Emilia! Glad I saw this as I just got a bounce back on our email thread. What’s the best way to reach you? (Pls feel free to DM.)

Hi hi, if anyone was emailing my Verge email this morning, I’m dealing with some email issues. You’d think this won’t happen to me but after yesterday I have little faith in tech platforms

The expression "There are no words" acts as a perfect conversation killer, Colin Campbell writes. "This empty phrase immediately ends any chance of a dialogue about loss and mourning. It encapsulates all that is wrong with how our society handles grief." on.theatln.tc/npPyF2Y

@TheAtlantic This is exceptional. A must-read and real-world primer on a very challenging topic.

@BradStone @aishacounts @technology @sarahfrier @KurtWagner8 @alexbarinka Best hire ever ✨ congrats @aishacounts

Thrilled to welcome @Aishacounts to the Bloomberg @technology team! She crushed it at Protocol (RIP) and will join our stellar team (@sarahfrier, @KurtWagner8 @alexbarinka) reporting on all the social media companies.

It was a banner year for the Fully Booked podcast. 🎧 Host @MLabrise looks back at some favorite episodes, including conversations with @AntonHur, @namwalien, @jessaminechan, @chrystabilton, and others. bit.ly/3BJz1Bz #podcasts #authors #books

@FightingTheGQP @KirkusReviews seems fixed now? so weird.

Thank you @KirkusReviews ! So many incredible books on this list and honored to have Normal Family be a part of it. ✨🥂