„Building an AI Coding Harness for FileMaker – From Code Analysis to Agentic Development“, as presented at EngageU 2026.
Please find the presentation slides for download below, together with links to FM-Lab and further information.
What does an AI coding agent need to truly understand a FileMaker solution?
FileMaker was designed as an integrated RAD environment for humans. Its schema, layouts, scripts and business logic are deeply interconnected, while much of their meaning remains implicit. For an AI agent, simply having access to XML, metadata or documentation does not necessarily mean understanding the solution.
This session explores how an AI Coding Harness can bridge that gap.
At the core of this approach is FM-Lab, an open-source framework that turns the internal structure of a FileMaker solution into an in-memory digital twin. SaveAsXML is parsed into a unified object catalog and represented as a data-driven knowledge graph of objects, relationships and roles.
DuckDB provides the analytical foundation, making even very large solution catalogs searchable and queryable within milliseconds. A semantic layer adds meaning and context on top of the structural information, while machine-readable FileMaker specifications provide explicit rules for script steps, functions, triggers, compatibility and code generation.
The result is a structured and queryable representation of the solution that both humans and AI agents can explore, analyze and reason about.
FM-Lab combines this foundation with tools for interactive exploration, static code analysis, graph analysis, automated tests and agentic deep research. The same architecture also provides the groundwork for reliable AI-assisted code generation – grounded in the actual solution structure and guided by explicit FileMaker specifications.
The key idea behind the session is simple:
The future of agentic development isn’t just smarter models.
It’s giving them a world they can actually understand.Structure → Meaning → Tools → Action
The presentation shows how this approach is already being used on a mission-critical FileMaker solution that has been continuously evolving for 30 years – significantly reducing the time needed to understand dependencies, investigate issues and implement changes.
FM-Lab itself is free and open source under the MIT License. Feel free to explore it, use it with your own solutions, modify it or build your own tooling on top of it.
🏆 Winner of the FileMaker Magazin Award 2026 — “Best FileMaker Tool”
Presentation Slides
The presentation slides are available for download here:
EngageU Presentation – Building an AI Coding Harness for FileMaker
FM-Lab
FM-Lab – AI Coding Harness for FileMaker
Download from GitHub · Free & Open Source · MIT License
Tags: Agents, ClaudeCode, DuckDB, EngageU, Vortrag