You’re right about the output and API being an issue for Mem(Just ran into that wall at top speed), what I like more is how I can get ideas completed sort of like the second brain concept. That’s the point of what I’m trying to do is speed up usage of data from my second brain being used via automation to create projects, or write articles.
Even working with notion via API is a nightmare after the conversion to AI to get data out of, so I’m still looking around. I’ve used MySQL, Xano, Notion, of course Coda is my main brain at the moment.
It’s just not having markup on top of me just wanting to scale up my output is frustrating
Not sure this helps, but this observation I made a while back notes the places where these tools tend to work well. Mem plays in the upper end of the note-taking funnel, whereas, Coda is in the lower end.
Hypothesis and other tools like Memex play at the headwaters of information collection points.
Is there still literally no way to get page content out of Coda into another system? Ideally the API but even if there was a connection to another system that I could use and then get it from there…
Last time I did this with Notion that had the “problem” of only exporting blocks but at least you can get the whole page by getting them recursively and I wrote a function to do that. But now I’m starting to use Coda and it looks amazing … except! If there’s no way to get page content out I’m not sure how we can work with it. Thanks.
Thanks for the reply @Bill_French . Any idea if there’s an official reason for this? It seems such a basic thing to be able to do and without it, it’s really holding it back in many ways - which seems crazy compared to all the amazing functionality it otherwise has.
In 2019 @Al_Chen_Coda said this was not possible and as far as I know, the API remains unchanged. It’s troubling that such a request needed to be added to the list of feature considerations because - as you point out - it is so basic, so essential – there’s no way any development team wouldn’t have already added to the list the instant the API was published.
The very first thing I looked for in the Coda API was the ability to get all of the content (should I have reason) and it was not there in 2019 when I entered my first hackathon.
This closed system attitude constrains innovation and adoption. It is a hidden tax that causes many deep integrations from ever occurring.
We arrived in the API economy roughly ten years ago. The economic benefits of access to your content in a SaaS world, for whatever purpose, is practically a given. It’s your content and they should democratize access.
Lacking access (in my view) is a tax that has many dimensions, the biggest of which is a tax on innovation. For example…
Generative AI is most advantageous when you blend in your content. We do this in a limited way with prompts that reference document objects such as rows, columns, formulas and named values. Your document content is out of reach, of course. Likewise, Coda AI cannot be used to create a unified fine-tuned model of all your content on a page or in a document so that it can provide context to advanced conversational AGI features. Ergo, we can’t broadly ask questions about documents we are unfamiliar with.
Eliminating this tax would incentivize small developers to build big ideas that bigger companies want to adopt. This tax actually constrains the adoption by the companies who can afford it.
Exactly. As a developer (with startup credits for Coda) I was going to use it for an in-house CMS system - as a very simplistic description - which could easily have been an add-on to Coda for others. I’ve previously used Notion for some parts of this, but theoretically Coda would be better.
Because of this issue, I’ve now moved to another system (PayloadCMS) and - while I might look at Coda for some parts of this in the future such as a content calendar - it’s less likely now.
I’m only one developer, and I know I’m not going change the future of Coda by my actions, but multiply this situation by hundreds or thousands of developers, and Coda is the one losing out here. We can find alternatives, but from their point of view, they are losing developers, add-ons, and “free” promotion.
If there was any genuine logic to making content access enterprise only, fair enough, but I can’t see it at all.
Another vote for this. We used Coda with my team for collaborating on the content of a big survey, hoping to use the API to read and convert the questions to the YAML required for the survey system. I was shocked to see there’s no endpoint to retrieve actual doc content, like the others here I kept looking thinking I was missing something.
