FileMaker Layout XML Skill

Andy Kear (from Clockwork Creative Technology, with a companion skill for script XML) is a more sophisticated skill, and it’s worth studying closely because it argues this very thesis in its own README — that there should be a clear boundary between what the AI determines (the layout logic and content) and what must be deterministic (the XML structure). It supplies that deterministic layer as a specification: all 18 layout object types, the decoded flag bits, the element-ordering constraints, and the paste-handler rules that cause FileMaker to silently drop malformed objects. And it was built the hard way — not from documentation, because Claris publishes no formal spec for the clipboard or FMUT XML formats, but by empirical round-trip reverse-engineering (generate, paste, save, copy back out, diff against native) across more than thirty-five production layouts. It is genuinely excellent work. It is also the clearest illustration of a skill’s ceiling: it makes the shape known to the model, but the model still authors the XML. A perfect spec lowers the error rate dramatically; it cannot make a wrong shape impossible, because the model is still doing the typing. Kear names precisely the boundary that the next rung up enforces in code rather than describes in prose.