Baserow is a no-code database with a browser UI — think Airtable, but open-source and self-hostable. Most teams that adopt it eventually need programmatic access alongside the UI: bulk imports, migrations between environments, scheduled scripts that read or update rows. The platform exposes a full REST API for that, with an OpenAPI 3.0 specification (currently v1.31.1).

Two ways to wrap an API in a CLI. You can hand-write the client in Python, which means every Baserow release that adds or modifies an endpoint becomes a maintenance task. Or you can generate the client from the spec, which means the CLI is always exactly what the platform documents — no version skew, no drift, no surface area you have to keep mentally in sync.

I went with generated. The trade-off is that the CLI’s shape is determined by Baserow’s API design rather than what I’d have built by hand; the upside is that maintenance is regenerate, ship. Same architectural choice in n8n-cli.

Built because the Baserow instance running in homelab-infra needed programmatic access for migrations between dev and prod, and writing yet another bespoke HTTP wrapper for each new tool gets old.