Design first, build second: Open Template Scaffolds is now public

If you've tried getting an AI assistant to build database tables for you, you've probably run into the same thing I did. It's happy to help — but it designs to its defaults, not yours. Field names drift between databases. Audit columns come out however the model felt that day. Often you can't tell, until you're deep in it, whether it actually understood what you asked for.

There are genuine bright spots, such as suggesting fields from its own domain knowledge that you hadn't thought of yet. It's definitely a mixed bag, albeit one holding a lot of promise.

Open Template Scaffolds is my answer to that. It's a free, open-source library of standards-based, AI-readable templates for building Microsoft Access and SQL Server tables. It's early days, so the initial templates run heavily to table design, although the long-term goal includes VBA templates and potentially even forms and reports. It's public now on GitHub, and anyone can use it. The link to the repo is below.

Here's the idea. A template describes a kind of thing you build over and over — a catalog, an inventory count, an assignment schedule. Your AI assistant reads that template together with your own standards — your naming rules, your audit columns, your error-handling pattern — and hands you back a design to look at: a diagram plus a field-by-field table.

You read the proposed design, you approve it or you redirect it, and only then does anything get built. Nothing is created in your database until you've said yes.

That last part matters a lot. The whole library is built around a principle Mike Wolfe articulated in his NoLongerSet Blog: design first, build second. You're never surprised by what the AI made, because you saw the plan and signed off on it. If the design is wrong, you and your AI assistant fix a diagram, not a database.

You bring your own standards. The library ships with a standards layer, but it's meant to be replaced. Make your own copy of the library, drop in your house rules, and every template now produces work that looks like your shop's work. As I put it while building this: the variation isn't in the scaffolding — it's in the details you hang on it.

You don't need to be an AI expert, or even have a file-connected assistant. If you've got Claude in your editor, point it at the folder. If all you've got is a chat window in your browser, there's a paste path that works too. The front-door instructions assume you might be coming from Excel and may never have used an AI assistant before. That was deliberate.

Where it's headed. Tables are the launch — they're the easiest place to prove the idea. But the harder, more valuable ground is code. Writing good VBA is the wall a lot of Access developers hit early, and it's where a standards-first, design-first assistant can do the most good. The library already includes its first code scaffolds and form specifications, and that's the direction: toward something that helps you design, build, and test — not just tables, but the craft around them.

It's MIT-licensed and free. Take it, fork it, make it yours. If you build something worth sharing back, there's a contributing guide and a real person (me) who reads what comes in and approves it for the library. When your template is added, it carries your attribution as the creator.

A word of honesty to close: AI-assisted development isn't free or effortless, and the costs aren't always what they look like. If you want the real bookkeeping behind one session — including a task that cost far more than it appeared to — that's the $265 post.

👉 https://github.com/Grover-Park-Consulting/open-template-scaffolds