Every couple of weeks, Mark walks through the best questions, workarounds, and discoveries from the Tana community Slack. Week 19 covers a small but handy new command, two ways to use AI on fields in bulk, how to chain AI commands together, a hidden corner of Tana that power users have been digging into, and what's coming up in the events calendar.

Copy node ID command [0:00]

There's a new quality-of-life command: copy node ID. Until now, "copy node link" gave you a full URL with the node ID on the tail end, which is more than you need when you're pointing the MCP at a specific place in your workspace. The new command copies just the ID, so it's easy to tell an AI agent exactly where to read or write in Tana. Credit to community members Ready, who first built this as a chain of commands, and Emmanuel, who suggested turning it into a built-in.

Auto-fill fields in bulk [1:11]

A question from Josie: you have a long list of tagged people and want to backfill fields like first name and last name without editing each one by hand. Two approaches:

Autofill command. Run command + K then autofill to fill a node's empty fields. To stop it touching fields you want to leave alone (like email or company), convert it to a custom autofill command that excludes those fields.
AI field with a custom prompt. Set a field's value with AI enhance field and a prompt like "return the first name only from this name." Drop the nodes into a table view and run that field, and it fills in the whole column at once.

One caution: when you run an AI field across a table, check how many rows the search returns first. Running a lengthy prompt on a high-reasoning model across a few thousand nodes burns through AI credits faster than people expect.

Chaining AI commands [5:30]

From Martin: when you build a custom AI command, Tana won't let you place the same command (like ask AI) back-to-back. The workaround is to nest commands instead. Convert the second step into its own command and run it from inside the first, so you can stack as many AI steps as you want.

To pass the result of one step into the next, write the first command's output to a field (a temporary field works well, for example an "agent notes" field), then have the second command read from that field. That gives you a single command that builds on its own output.

Hidden formula fields [7:45]

Kate went Easter-egg hunting and surfaced formula fields, a long-standing prototype that's quietly available but not officially released, so expect rough edges. With command + K then set formula you can turn a field into a formula. The standout use, found by Alberto, is replicating a search node from inside a formula field: instead of a separate search node for "related tasks," you get a field that finds every task whose project is set to this node (self). Kate wrote up the fields, capabilities, and semantics in detail, so start there if you want to go down the rabbit hole. This one is for advanced users.

What's coming up [10:40]

The events calendar keeps running on an alternating cycle, with a strong focus on MCP:

Tana Systems Lab every other week, going deep on recent real-world MCP use cases. A recent session covered thread and file management for Claude Code and Codex.
Tana MCP help sessions in the alternate weeks. These are unrecorded, drop-in, and have no set agenda, just bring your questions.

You can find the latest sessions at tana.inc/community. And if you find a clever workaround or a rabbit hole of your own, share it in the Slack.