Airtable’s field creation API has a gotcha nobody talks about - you can’t change field types after creating them. Traditional databases let you ALTER COLUMN to switch data types, but Airtable makes you create a whole new field and manually migrate everything. Found this out the hard way trying to convert number fields to currency fields through the API. The docs make it sound like you can just update field configs, but you’re locked into whatever type you pick initially. Error handling sucks too - validation errors just throw generic HTTP 422s with no real explanation. I had to build my own client-side validation to avoid dealing with cryptic server responses. One more thing - watch your permissions. Your API key might work fine on one base but randomly fail on another because of different workspace vs base permission setups.