By Elijah Davis, Lead Solution Architect, Enterprise, Fivetran
A customer came to me with a tricky request: they wanted near real-time visibility into FDA food recalls and safety alerts to reduce supply chain risks. On paper, it sounded simple: call the API, grab the data, sync it. But any developer who’s built against a new API knows what comes next. Pagination doesn’t behave the way you expect. Authentication throws curveballs. Rate limits block you just as tests start running. And even after data flows, you still have to implement retries, state management, and error handling before it’s production ready. Normally, I’d expect a connector like this to take a couple of days. Instead, I decided to run an experiment: pair the Fivetran Connector SDK with Cursor AI and see if I could get it running in under 30 minutes.
How it Played Out
The Fivetran Connector SDK gives you a standardized framework, manages state, provides retries and error handling, and supports in-flight transformations. In short, it’s production-ready scaffolding. That freed me up to focus on the quirks of the FDA API itself.
Cursor AI filled in the blanks. I fed Cursor a detailed prompt with requirements: incremental syncs using the FDA’s report_date field, rate limiting that adjusted if no API key was present, automatic flattening for deeply nested JSON responses, and robust retry logic. To my surprise, Cursor generated a working connector right away. It produced configuration files, error handling, and even documentation.
It wasn’t perfect. The unit tests were half-baked, and the logging wasn’t detailed enough for production monitoring. I still had to figure out performance tuning. However, the fundamentals were solid. The connector pulled data, respected rate limits, flattened JSON, and checkpointed progress for reliable syncs. What normally would have taken me two or three days was up and running in less than 30 minutes.
Lessons From the Experiment
A few things stood out. First, details matter. The more specific I made the requirements in the prompt, the better the AI’s output. I wound up using a 3-group structure for my prompt. The groups were [Data source, Specific requirements, System instructions]. Vague prompts meant a lot more cleanup later. Second, I learned not to treat AI as a black box. Reviewing and testing the code myself was non-negotiable. Understanding how it worked meant I could debug edge cases, optimize performance, and make the connector maintainable. Finally, I realized AI isn’t just good for code—it’s good for docs too. Cursor generated a README that gave me a head start that I rounded out with real-world examples and troubleshooting notes.
For me, this wasn’t about cutting a few hours off a project. It was proving I could use AI and the Fivetran Connector SDK together to build something production-ready in record time. The AI-generated code wasn’t just fast; it followed best practices like exponential backoff for retries and state management to ensure reliability. Paired with the Connector SDK, it gave me an enterprise-grade solution that I could trust.
Why this Matters
AI isn’t replacing developers. It’s multiplying what we can do. Instead of spending days on boilerplate, we can achieve working solutions faster and with greater consistency. The mundane parts—pagination, retries, flattening—get handled automatically, and we can spend our time on the parts that require human judgment. Building pipelines is no longer a chore but a problem-solving exercise.
It raises an obvious question: If one person can build a production-ready connector in under 30 minutes, what can a team of developers build? That’s exactly the challenge of the AI Accelerate Hackathon.
Your turn: Build and compete - Register Here
At the hackathon, you’ll get:
- Access to the Connector SDK: production-ready scaffolding for state, retries, error handling, and more.
- AI tools: to accelerate boilerplate coding and docs.
- Six weeks: to explore new datasets, APIs, and creative use cases.
- Prizes: $12,500 for first place, $7,500 for second, $5,000 for third.
The Google Cloud Accelerate Hackathon runs September 16 - October 28, with winners announced on November 15. If AI can help one person build a production-ready connector in 30 minutes, imagine what you and your team can do in six weeks.