05: Claris ADT and Your FileMaker Skills

'This plugin from Claris will completely change the way you code. I guarantee it.' ~ my good-self, on stage at Reconnect.

You've built a Skill, shaped it, improved it and installed other people's. Which begs the question: do you still need your own Skills, now that Claris has built the Agentic Development Toolkit (ADT)?

In this post:

• What Claris ADT Reaches in Your FileMaker File

• From Clipboard to Live File

• Snapshot or Live?

• What Claris ADT Did on a 20-Year-Old Solution

• Where Your FileMaker Skills Sit on Claris ADT

• Claris ADT Vocabulary

What Claris ADT Reaches in Your FileMaker File

ADT connects your Agent to the FileMaker file itself. It reads and changes schema, scripts and layouts directly: no clipboard XML, no copy and paste. It carries Claris's own FileMaker Help, and it checks calculations against the FileMaker engine before they're handed over.

Currently, ADT is in a developer preview, and Claris runs it through the Claris Developer Preview hub. I was one of the first group of developers in its closed beta, from July. Claris has now announced expanded access to Agentic Development for FileMaker, and quoted me in the post.

It installs from Claris's own package installer, works in the Code tab of Claude Desktop, and reaches a file FileMaker Pro has open, with Agent Access switched on. Always a development copy. Never the live file.

From Clipboard to Live File

Before ADT, we had four ways to get an Agent's work into a FileMaker file: the clipboard (copy and paste), an upgrade tool that patches the file, a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, and FileMaker plugins. I'll politely call the results mixed.

ADT reads the live file directly. What it sees is always current, and each change can be checked as it's made. That's why ADT is now the way forward.

Snapshot or Live?

There are still two ways to read a FileMaker file, and both earn their place.

Save as XML. FileMaker's own export of the whole solution: a snapshot, taken at one moment, that you can analyse anywhere.

ADT. The live file: always current, and every change checked as it's made.

Snapshots are good for analysis. Live is good for working.

What Claris ADT Did on a 20-Year-Old Solution

In August, I pointed ADT at analysis on a real client solution: a vertical-market student database, twenty years in production. Thirty-four files, about twelve hundred layouts, about thirty-two hundred scripts. The goal was full browser access for administrators, through WebDirect, with the business logic left exactly where it is.

Example: A user clicks Print letters. The script in the main file calls a script in the mail-merge file, which reaches Enter Preview Mode, and WebDirect doesn't support it. Nothing on the button tells you. We asked the Agent four questions, using about twenty-eight minutes of agent time in a ninety-minute session. Nine hundred and fifty-one layouts a script or button can reach; up to four hundred and seventy-four needing a change or a specific test. Then we checked it: ADT's live read against an independent Save as XML export of one of our largest files. All 218 scripts matched.

Analysis first has always been my discipline. With ADT it becomes a conversation. FileMaker stays the foundation: our rules, our security and our data didn't move. ADT changes the speed.

Where Your FileMaker Skills Sit on Claris ADT

ADT is the foundation. Your Skills are your layer on top: your conventions, your workflows, your checks. They don't compete with ADT. They sit above it.

ADT carries Claris's baseline standards in its filemaker-standards Skill. My fmp-dev-design-patterns Skill is my layer on top, and where the two differ, mine wins, because it's my preference:

| | Claris ADT baseline | My layer on top | |---|---|---| | Script | Email Invoice To Contact | Email: Invoice To Contact | | Field | Address_City | AddressCity | | Global field | UserName_global | UserName_g |

Neither is wrong. The point is that the Agent follows your conventions, not just the baseline. The naming Skill you built in lesson one is exactly this kind of layer.

Reference Skills work the same way. With ADT installed, my claris-filemaker-pro Skill checks Claris's own Help and the engine first, then adds what ADT doesn't carry. Without ADT, it works from its own references.

Claris ADT Vocabulary

Claris ADT. The Agentic Development Toolkit: Claris's own connection between an Agent and a FileMaker file.

Agent Access. The FileMaker Pro setting that lets an Agent reach a file Pro has open.

Save as XML. FileMaker's export of a whole solution as a snapshot.

Live read. ADT reading the open file directly, current at the moment of the question.

Baseline standards. The naming and design conventions ADT carries from Claris, which your own Skills can override.

Takeaway

I stand by the guarantee. ADT changes the way you code, and it changes the speed. But it doesn't know your conventions, your workflows or your clients. Start from the official source, then layer your own.

Next, proving your layer actually earns its place. Continue with my next post, Test a FileMaker Skill: Evals and Baselines.

More to come . . .