The Coda Formula Interbellum

When Formulas Become Conversations

Imagine trying to book a meeting room. You need it for “half a day,” a simple, common-sense request. But the system in front of you demands a number. “How many hours is that?” you wonder. “Or should I enter it in days?” This small moment of friction is something many of our users face. We, as makers, have traditionally forced them to translate their natural way of thinking into a language the machine understands — discrete units like hours, days, or months. This is the past: a time of manual, handcrafted formula creation.

hard for the maker, smooth for the user

To bridge this gap between human intuition and machine logic, we became master craftspeople. We spent hours architecting intricate solutions, wrestling with Regex and nested SwitchIf() statements, just to teach the machine what "three weeks" means. The complex code we build is a testament to that effort—a proud solution to a fundamentally human problem, but one that also highlights the limitations we've been working within.

WithName(thisRow.Duration.Lower(), inputText,
  WithName(
    If(
      inputText.RegexExtract("(\d+\.?\d*)").IsNotBlank()…