Power Platform Boost Podcast
The Power Platform Boost Podcast is your timely update of what's new and what is happening in the community of Microsoft business applications. Join hosts Ulrikke Akerbæk and Nick Doelman for a lively discussion of all things Power Platform!Like what you hear? Buy us a beer: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/Powerplatboost
Power Platform Boost Podcast
Everyone's doing it (#80)
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
- Everyone's doing it by Luise Freese
- Claude in Power Apps 4 ways to 10x Productivity by Sean Astrakhan
- Power Apps Code Apps update, Code Apps just killed Canvas Apps (Power Apps has changed forever),
The Architecture of Power Apps Code Apps by Charles Sexton and Josh Giles - Have a Plan? Build Your Solution with Plan Designer by Nick Doelman on Zero to Hero
- Code Agents and Code Apps with GitHub Copilot by Scott Durow on Zero to Hero
- Build Power Pages sites with AI using agentic coding tools (preview) by Neeraj Nandwana
- The end of Power Pages? by Nick Doelman
- Running a Hackathon with Ulrikke Akerbæk on CRM Rocks by Markus Erlandsson and Marlin Martnes
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Cold Open: AI Like Teenage Sex
SPEAKER_03This week probably is saying AI is like teenage sex. Everyone talks about it. Nobody really knows how to do it. Everyone thinks everyone else is doing it. So everyone claims they're doing it.
SPEAKER_04And I love it because I saw that and I was just laughing, thinking, yes, that's exactly what it's like.
Check-In: Kids, Travel, Powerlifting
NickHey Erika, how's it going?
SPEAKER_03It's going well. I'm here in my home with two sick kids. Whoop whoop, living my life. So my my youngest is right there collaring, and the oldest is in the room next door coughing. So if you hear any noise, it's just kids. So how are you?
NickCool. I'm good. Yeah, no coughing here. I'm obviously not at home. I'm traveling again. I'm in beautiful St. John's, Newfoundland, which is like east coast of Canada. Rainy and foggy, but above zero, so it's all good. Um, and I'm here, not anything to do with the power platform, but I will be going on a platform exerting power. It's a it's the Canadian National Powerlifting Competition. Crazily signed up for three events. The first one will be later today, and then the next two days. So, but yeah, feeling good, feeling ready. Nothing new hurts. So yeah, we'll go with that.
SPEAKER_03Feeling strong. And then also uh, because you warned me, you're like, I'm gonna be so hungry when we record because you usually don't get to eat in the morning before weigh-ins, but not today because you've been so good.
NickYeah, I've actually stepped on the scale this morning before breakfast and realized I had about a kilo and a half of uh space and then it had some breakfast and a few coffees, got back on the scale, still had around a kilo, so I'm good. I'm able to drink a bit of water and everything. So yeah, it it it it makes a huge difference than starving yourself. But so I basically got to maintain that over the next two days. So no going crazy. But I think if I just eat basically my my uh weight loss protocol is quit eating garbage and it's amazing. And I haven't had a beer in like about a month either. So yeah.
SPEAKER_03Wow. So what happens then? Are you like a teenager then when you have your first beer and just go whoop whoop?
NickOh, yeah. I'm gonna be like on Wednesday evening, I'm gonna be totally silly. Probably after like a half a sip. So yeah.
SPEAKER_03Exactly right. Oh, that's funny. Uh, and I shouldn't say teenager, I just I'm just dating myself now. Okay, well, that's uh sounds like a lot of fun, and good luck. And uh please send me the link because I usually follow you online when you do these things, and I and I watch online when you uh do it or
Training, Weight Cuts, And Rituals
SPEAKER_03to cheer you on, but also make sure you don't hurt yourself. And I don't think I fully thought this through because I don't have any influence on it, it's just yeah, I it feels more safe if I can see you for some reason.
NickI appreciate I appreciate you, and I know I've said this to you before, and just like everybody else knows. You're one of the few people that came out to watch when I went and competed at World Bench, and that to me that meant the world to me to see in the crowd, but it was also it was good that that was the event that you watched because powerlifting generally can go for like, as you know, you've watched the live stream like three hours plus, and it can get a little tedious like watching people you don't know lift when you went to a bench only, which went, I think went pretty smoothly, pretty quick, and then you got to experience you got to experience the whole experience, I guess, of being live in the competition. So I do appreciate that. So yeah, and for anybody else who is watching online and stuff, I do appreciate I do get some messages from like random people and stuff. And interesting enough, I got a message from someone in our community, an MVP in Ottawa, asking me, Hey, what gym do you train at? And he actually uh his name, you know how bad I am with names, and I will remember it next time, but he actually trains at the same gym I do, but kind of at the opposite end of the clock. He goes in the evenings, I go in the mornings. So it's like, yeah, we definitely got to get together sometime. This is a great thing about the community, right? You're sort of meeting different people and powerlifting community, power platform community. Uh yeah, it's all good. It's uh really a lot about the human touch.
SPEAKER_03It really is. And I see that a lot now when you listen to podcasts and you hear um kind of feature splash thingies, like, yeah, it's the 100% human and with heart and no AI, and yeah, we do it ourselves, and it's become this trademark that you know, no AI here. This is purely human. I think you'll see that more and more pop up. It's like, yeah, human only. Um, but and this is a lot of this, you know. I mean, if you wanna, if you go see powerlifting, right? So seeing what you do, it's pure human experience, people sweating and working out and doing the thing. And uh, yeah, it's it's
Community And The Human Element
SPEAKER_03a lot of fun. Um yeah.
NickI had to I had a very interesting conversation about AI and powerlifting yesterday, actually, with well, actually, it was a conversation with my friend Sandro, who's he's he's a power lifter and and he runs meets as well. Also with world champion Brittany Slater. Uh Brittany is like the I think one of the strongest women in the world. She's a huge inspiration. Uh she recently came up a little bit short of this competition in Sheffield, but amazing human being. But we were having this interesting conversation about AI and powerlifting. About do we are we at a point like technology-wise, we could get AI referees, like set up cameras, whatever, and then therefore they could do evaluate the lift and come back very quickly with is that a good lift or a bad lift? But Brittany said something that really stuck with me. She said, part of the spirit of sport is that human connection and human involvement. I uh I definitely really appreciated that statement. I I agree as well. There's just something about it. So much as we're going to dive into AI things very quickly now, it is still important to have to live
Can AI Judge Powerlifting Fairly
Nickin a in an AI-free world or experiences as well. Not to say I don't use AI in my training. I actually prepared my warm-up attempts, my my whole kind of pre-warmup training strategy, because my friend Lizzie's here and helping me, which is awesome. Lizzie's amazing. Another one of my amazing friends, I kind of prepared for her using AI, like a warmup card, including, and I got like Claude use Claude code for this, but the other AIs would work, but my warm-up sets and also the the color of the plates, like an image of the plates that need to be loaded, the timings and everything. So yeah, I'm maybe I'm a bit of a geek, but it's all things I normally would write on the back of a napkin or whip out an Excel sheet for him. Like, no, no, I'm gonna get AI to do this for me. And I'm like, well, this is so cool. So anyways.
SPEAKER_03So how you replaced Chris Yet, or are you still Chris still?
NickOh no, no, no, no, no, no, no. So he's not here this week. My my coach, Chris Fudge, who he's really big into this thing called HyROX. So for those of you who are watching, you may know, might have heard of HyROX. Um, it is if for those of you who don't, it is a completely different thing. I will not, I say now, I won't get into it, but never say never, because there's a lot of running involved.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, we've talked about this before.
NickYeah,
Using AI To Plan Warmups And Loads
Nickyou do an activity and then you run a kilometer, and then you do another activity and then you run a kilometer. Like the activities look cool. There's like sled pushes, there's um with the kettlebells and kind of raising above your head, like that stuff. But then you got to run a kilometer. Like, oh, let me just do the fun stuff. And then HyROX was, I found out, was invented or created in Germany. So, of course, you know, the it's a very set set of rules and activities. So, you know, the our German friends out there, and you guys know who you are. They're very much protocol and this and has to follow an order and everything like that. So it just when I found out that HyROX was uh founded in Germany, like, oh yeah, it totally makes sense.
SPEAKER_03I actually also saw a news article about this that was shared kind of in our company. We have this um uh socials group uh on Slack, and this one's supposed to here it's called they call that a cult, like the Hyrox cult, and because it's it captures people in the workings, it's kind of the same. People go crazy and then suddenly they stop doing everything else and they just focus on this. It's like I think you had a three-up kind of wave a few years ago. These are the same same kind of mechanism, it triggers the same kind of people, I think. Yeah, so be wary, speaking they they might get their house.
SPEAKER_01Speaking of speaking of cults, let's get into the AI news.
SPEAKER_03Okay, so let me then just because this is it I know that we sort of is this a family show or not? Can I can I you can I start
Hyrox, Fitness Fads, And Focus
SPEAKER_03then with the the free the Louise thing?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. Okay, yes, I saw that.
SPEAKER_03So I thought just to kick this off a little bit on point, because I uh well I'm not sure if it's on point, but you know, this is where my mind went, okay. So this is my scroll segue from cult to this. So I saw a post this week from Louise saying AI is like teenage sex. Everyone talks about it, nobody really knows how to do it, everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so everyone claims they're doing it, and I love it because I saw that and I was just laughing, thinking, yes, that's exactly what it's like, and it's so funny. So just yeah, shout out Louise. That was a good one. Um, and thanks for pointing that out.
NickAll right, so yeah, so trying to figure out your way around this, like and like, oh yeah, I
Kicking Off AI News
Nickuse I I use AI all the time.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, exactly. Right. And then you know, no one's doing it, but then some people are doing it, so let's talk about the people who are actually doing it. So, first on the list is uh Sean Asterkin boasting that he is now he has four ways to be ten times more productive with COD in power. So this is a video, I haven't watched it, but you did.
NickYes. Yeah, yeah, and so he's using it's it's interesting because like I find with all these AI things, um, and and I've had this conversation with other folks as well, like in terms of what's the best AI tool to use. And I think it really depends on the week. It's like a horse race. Like one week things are very popular. Like last week we were all about open claw. That's almost, I wouldn't say taking a back seat, but it's a sort of we've kind of moved on from that already in a sense. But you so have you have Claude, coward, sorry?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, which is crazy in of itself, right? It's like last week and then it's all just now, everyone can do that. It's now the novelty is gone already because now you have the browser
Claude Code Automating Power Automate
SPEAKER_03thing and it can kind of do things on your behalf. All of them have that now. So I mean Yeah.
NickYeah, so she so Sean basically did a video, and this is stuff I've been experimenting with as well, and it's interesting. So there's cloud code, there's cloud co-work. Of course, we have cloud code built into Visual Studio, which I use. Of course, I use GitHub Copilot and Visual Studio Code. Um, I've used Codex a little bit, and it's great because it's like I work on code, it describes what I want to build, it goes through and diagnoses things, it identifies things that could be wrong, and it has really helped me out in terms of PowerPages development. And we'll talk about some of the other cool stuff with Cloud Code and PowerPages in a bit, but overall, just doing regular development, these tools have been really helpful within the context of Visual Studio Code. And then we have this Cloud Code Browser extension, which literally takes over your browser and allows you to fill in forms and things like this. So Sean kind of described it, and I tried this out, and it's scarily, it kind of works, where you describe, for instance, a Power Automate flow that you want to build, and you have that in your Cloud Code browser side panel, you're logged into Power Automate, it can go and it will take screenshots and it will reason and it will start building that flow for you almost better than the Power Automate built-in co-pilot will do it. But to be fair, it will take probably a couple hours to bang out a fairly simple Power Automate flow, but it will still do it. And I've been using, and I think I messaged you and I talked to a few other people about this. For those of you who are in the MVP program, you know you have to log all your activities or tasks for the year, um, which can be a little bit tedious uh to kind of go through, okay, what blogs that I do, what sessions that I present, what videos that I make. So I actually, as an experiment last week, I like, okay, Cloud Code, I've I've logged in. So I've not told Cloud Code my login credentials. I'm not going to tell it that. I've already logged into the MVP site where we have to log our activities. And then I also pointed it to my YouTube channel and my blog channel, and of course the podcast channel. And I said, start going through these and start logging these activities. And I gave it a few more details. Here's the form you need to fill it. Here are some of the drop-down values I wanted to fill out. But I did that once. And then I just let it sit and I watched it for and it went for like two to three hours. A couple times it stopped. I had to kind of restart it, but it logged all of those activities for me. I still have to go through and clean up a few things, but
MVP Logging With Browser Agents
Nickit saved me. I would have spent those two hours going back, cutting and pasting, filling it in and everything. I know they're coming, they keep saying they're going to come up with an API or an MCP server or something, but anyways, but for now, it's like a lot of cutting and pasting. And it did it all for me. And I just watched the process and I'm like, whoa, like this is the fact it can go to the YouTube channel, the fact it can find the number of views, then that fact it can fill it in. It just completely blown me away. So that's a lot of what Sean showed with his video as well, kind of circling back to that. So again, there are some security concerns with that because they're like, oh, you're giving access to this Claude agent, a sec of, you know, within the browser, access to what could be sensitive sites. Like, for example, the MVP site is behind a login and firewall, but I did log in on behalf, and then Claude Code did not have the ability to log in for me.
SPEAKER_03No, exactly.
NickSo, anyways, it is something uh worth experimenting with. I mean, of course, experiment with these things with caution, especially when you're if you're, you know, oh, I'm gonna automate my my banking and my accounting. It's like uh yeah, you might want to think about that, but yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_03And explicitly say, I mean, if you do that, then you have disregarded and not read a single one of the because I I I just uh I dove into this last week as well. And the number of times it says is explicitly read this before you accept and do not hook it up to financial things and do not use this for this specifically. So I mean, and that's you know, the interviews I've heard with the guy that created open claws, like he says, I I don't know I've every chance that I've gotten, I have written in exclamation, you know, the biggest and boldest I can read the documentation. If you want to use this, read the documentation. I made it hard for people to implement this and to get going with open claw just because I wanted there to be an entry bar, but people disregard it. And then they just think it's okay, and then they hammer in with the pull requests and and and shit all the time. And I mean, it's it's not fair. You need to understand what the thing you're using is supposed to be used for. Um, but also I I had a conversation with my colleague just before I went on this call where I said, you know, I
Safety, Docs, And Responsible Use
SPEAKER_03I'm also using now Claude um the co-work. And I love how the plugin with PowerPoint and Excel is so great compared to the again, compared to the co-pilot one, because the co-pilot one is great. It can translate and understands the context and it sees your slide, but it can't edit anything yet. So I expect they'll like anything will get there eventually. But the plugin does. So you have a plugin for Chat TPT and you have a plugin for Claude, and it can actually then edit. So and that is phenomenal. I mean, the productivity, and I've used it for things like um translate this whole 70-page thing to English or to Norwegian. I've had it spruce up these slides, or uh, this is what I want all of these slides to look like, and I just make one and it adapts the styling. I mean, come on, it's saving me so much time. And of course, I'm not doing that on kind of ITRA specific things. It's just this is the template, this is the assessment template that I'm using, it has all these things and all this text, right? So more cautious not to use because I because I don't know. I haven't taken the time to understand how what does it do with that information? Does it take the information in that uh PowerPoint and send it off to the cloud in the US? I'm not sure. So I won't, but maybe it doesn't. And that's for me to kind of dive into the security details of all of this. But you know, that's a work, that's a full-time job these days to read through all of those terms and conditions. And I'll be the first to admit that I don't read the fine print as often as I should, means I have to be extra careful with these things. But yeah, I'm with you, and I mean, I yeah, I'm diving into the same thing, and I love kind of just giving it. So what I did was I gave uh Chat DPT read access to LinkedIn to my LinkedIn profile, connected it because they can't really do much, can only read, and then said, uh, give me an overview of all the
Real Productivity In Office Plugins
SPEAKER_03activities I've done this year. Exactly with the same reason use that because I need to put it into the MEP program so that I get an overview of what I've done. Because usually I'll I'll post about it on LinkedIn, right? So I thought that was kind of the this the one source of truth that I could use to get it to give me an overview and from that create a plan, create the text, go grab the links, and then also then plugging that into the browser extension to to allow it to go in and plug it in for me. So we'll see how far I get with it. I ran out of credits very fast. So I've upgraded my uh subscription now.
NickYeah, yeah. We'll talk about that in a bit too when we uh get to a few other parts. Like I had to upgrade Claude for the Power Pages thing. Just it was just crazy.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, but so with uh Sean Astrichan, what he did was he played around with uh Power Automate and Power Apps and also Dataverse um um kind of data modeling, kind of talking a little bit about the future of low code and pro code and um try to kind of get a bit of his view on that uh from what it seems like on the things. Um yes, okay. Um next on the thing is um something from Charles Sixton and Josh Giles. We love these guys. They post videos where they're just talking and hashing things out. One of their videos that they posted on LinkedIn, they talked about the new pack CLI. Um and um, and also I think some one of them said that it's not gonna be depre that it's gonna be deprecated, but then uh I saw Daniel posted a comment that it's not gonna be deprecated just yet. So you have the code apps commands, will be deprecated, uh, but not the rest of the pack CLI. So this is just kind of one of the little nitty-grittels. If you're working with this and make sure that you keep up to date on what kind of CLI you're using and and what it can do, and if you have tools that use these specifically, make sure that they update themselves because they can do that now.
NickYeah, and they they've done a couple other good videos as well. They did post one that, again, this is a little bit clickbaity, and I mean I I do it as well, just to it it gets the engagement going, to be honest. Uh, but they called it Code Apps Just Killed Canvas Apps, and that generated a lot of discussion on LinkedIn back and forth, which is really interesting. But I mean, they made a really good case of how this
Costs, Credits, And Limits
Nickthis all goes through and how these tools are evolving. And we've talked about this before. They did another video, these guys are killing it. I just love their YouTube channel. Like, I I know I I'm afraid, like, okay, guys, don't burn yourselves out because it's quality content. Like, I mean, like you and I to coordinate sometimes when we do this podcast. Like, these guys are like they do these recordings together. So yeah, good, like again, big fans, guys. Can't wait to uh meet up with you at EPPC. Actually, you guys are doing a session, so I'll be able to meet up there maybe before, depending. But they had another one about the architecture of Power Apps Code Apps, which was really good because again, it's what you said. Don't let the don't just blindly tell the black box what to do or how it works. And they go through and explain how these pieces connect together, what the AI agents are doing as they create the code, how to wire it together, how it's all working. And I think that's so important for us, like to if we're gonna drive this, you know, grab the steering wheel of these things, understand how the machine works, how it's gonna react to different things. So it was a great video of sort of explaining the whole process. So if you're thinking of getting into code apps, which I think if you're working the power platform, sooner or later it's gonna land on your lap, their their videos are, I would say, a must-watch for sure to get you ramped up very quickly on this.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, yeah. And also
Pack CLI Updates And Clarity
SPEAKER_03understanding not only because we have code apps and power apps that you you start from Visual Studio Code a kind of way, but then you also have code apps from vibe.powerapps.com, which is the same underneath. It's supposed to be the same thing, but it's not. So the one you get from Vibe will be the base prompt underneath it is much more strict and structured. So that will give you more of the same thing every time. It's kind of so you can look at it as a boilerplate underneath, and it won't really be as creative as you can be on your own vibe coding with code apps. So just wanted to make sure people understand that even though those two products are kind of called the same thing, and yeah, it is kind of the same thing, it's a code app, but then one has um a more strict base line than the other. So when you if you have a so because I I'm doing I'm meant to do a course on vibe.poweraps.com tomorrow where we introduce the vibe and talk about why coding
Code Apps Hype Vs Canvas Apps
SPEAKER_03and platform to business users. And the idea is that, yeah, so vibe.powerous.com is cre is designed for you to go in and and play with your use case. But then when you're done and you've played with it and you you've made something that you like, come to me and then I will help you make that enterprise great. And and I will not continue on from what you've built, but we'll build it again as a code app from scratch using our for the developer tool. And then it's a very it's very uh important to separate the two things. And kind of also what you can and cannot do and should and should not do. And I've heard also customers saying to me, why did I need you? I have live Delph perhaps.com. I can create a code app. And I'm like, yeah, well, call me when Dells, and not if, but when, because it's not meant for production. So understanding the tool and what it's supposed to be used for, uh, it's was always important, and it is still important. So yeah.
NickYeah, it's uh and I could think of an analogy there. You talk about, well, why do we need you? So this is bear with me on this one. A couple weeks ago, there was our sink, there was something wrong, and I I the flow of the water wasn't the greatest. Like, okay, so I looked underneath the sink, like underneath, opened the cupboard, and as I reached in, my arm kind of knocked the drain, and the drain completely popped off the bottom of the sink. Like crap. And then I what's happened? It's it was all rusted out. And then I look at there's a double sink, I look at the other one, and it's like completely rusted as well. So the fact, at least it didn't cause any kind of water damage, like, okay, so like, okay, I gotta fit like course it was the middle of the day. I had a thousand
Vibe Code Apps: Studio Vs VS Code
Nickother things. Okay, I need to fix this. So, like, okay, what parts do I need? How am I gonna do this? Do do because I like I'm kind of handy, I can do plumbing and drywall and a few other things. But then my wife said, Why don't you just get someone else to do it? Like, you're busy, you have other things to do. Like, okay, sure. So, yeah, I called up a plumber. Was it expensive? Yes. But he was done in about 45 minutes the same day. He did a professional job, he used all the right tools, he had the right protocols. He even, like, after he had everything connected, he tried it. He's like, nope, there's a drip. I don't like it. He went back in, he fixed it all up. And it was like, okay, so there's there, so the analogy there is, yeah, could I have done it myself? Absolutely. Would it have been perfect? No, probably not as definitely not as good as a job as he did. It might not have lasted as long. It would have definitely taken me a lot longer for sure, um, to do all this stuff. It would have taken time out of my day. So, yeah, it goes back to the vibe coding. Yeah, you can build it. So you could prototype it. Like I knew exactly sort of what to do, but it was good to get a professional involved because this guy, or the plumber came in, he did so much of a better job. So it's like AI, right? Because we have these years of system architecture, dataverse, data modeling, process, security, all of these other things. These are the things that people like you and I are thinking about as we're vibe coding or vibe engineering these applications. That's not necessarily to say people couldn't do it on their own, but for prototyping, whatever, yeah, get the experts involved to make sure it's enterprise grade. Um, so that's my little plumbing rant analogy.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, no, but I think you're absolutely right. And also think that, you know, if you're if this happened on your cabin over the weekend, then you could probably have made it kind of not leak and be workable throughout the weekend until you can get a hand, someone to come in and help you. Or, you know, at the same thing, someone might need a new app and want to try to do it themselves, can now create a not a proof of concept, but an MVP that they can actually then use for a week or have people test and go through and kind of get feedback. And they can go further in that discovery phase to the point where when
Prototype Fast, Then Build For Enterprise
SPEAKER_03they come to me with an app, they can go, actually, I tested it. We got these this feedback, some people like this, some people like this better. I can't get it to do that. So can you help me? And then also we'll make sure that it's enterprise grade when we build it from scratch. And I I think that's beneficial. And you kind of also overlap languages a little bit, which I like. Mostly my job up until this point in my career, if I boil it all down, it's been translating and communicating between business and and technology. I'm the mediator, I'm the person and the translator in between. But when we learn more about the business and they learn more about what these things are, and they are kind of in charge of fiddling with it, it creates a different language and something tangible to talk to. And then suddenly it doesn't become about the the how rounded the corners are, the color of the button. Maybe it has more to do with the functionality and the flow of work. So maybe we can actually go get a bit closer to that conversation now, and that's what I'm hoping for. But we'll see. We'll see how it goes. This is still early days, it's still very new, so we'll just have to see how it lands. But it's definitely exciting to be a part of it. Also saw speaking of vibe, I mean, I saw so Victor Dantis has his uh Zero to Hero thing going on now, new speaker every week. And I saw you did um session on vibe in Primaraps, but not vibe.pows.com, but how you vibe code and use AI in all the different apps or services or products. So do you want to talk a little bit about?
NickYeah, sure. It was more like the the core of it was about plan designer, which I'm a big fan of. Again, talk about building proof of concepts and things like this. And I think plan designer does a good job, but the way Microsoft sort of positions it is like start at the plan designer prompt. And part of what I did, like, no, no, no, no, no, like whether you use plan designer or not, it's
The Plumber Analogy For AI Work
Nickalways about the pre-planning. And I described how I use M36, how I created system prompts specifically for architecting power platform solutions with has a lot of the features of things to ask and look out for, and using a lot of these tools to build a product requirements document, sort of kind of building the spec and then making sure that spec kind of nails sort of what your vision is. And then from that spec, creating the prompt, and from that prompt, then feeding it into plan designer, because I find doing that method, your plan designer experience is much more focused and much more streamlined, and you can actually get some way better results. So that was a fun session. I I know Victor has the recordings up and it kind of goes through that whole, the whole process of using like using AI, but not kind of start like making sure the cart or the horse was before the cart kind of process. And it really reflects on how I've been designing apps lately and the things that I build. Like I don't even, and that's always been the case, right? Like whether you're building a power app or coding something from ground up, the very first thing you shouldn't be doing is starting to dump in, jump in writing code. Of course, with these vibe tools now, we get we're tempted, right? We have this, oh, here's this app I want to build, do-da-do-do-do, and just go. The AI tools are most happily going to build you an app, but it's gonna be a little bit really clunky and really awkward if you take the time to plan out your app ahead of time and you can use AI tools to do it. You can define things like your data model, your security model, your user interfaces, like all of these things that are important. As you know, the sooner you get these things more clearly defined, the better the whole building and infrastructure process goes. So that was really about what my session was all about. And I know we had some other sessions like with April and a few others. And I know that there was Scott's was last week. I missed it, uh, was kind of hoping to watch it. I'll probably grab the recording. But uh, did you watch that one?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, absolutely. I did. And I uh was gonna talk about it, but I wanted to kind of touch on something you said before because
Better Handoffs Between Biz And Dev
SPEAKER_03I think the using AI, because in our course as well, I because I try to, so of course I'm planning the course uh with um, I think I'm using GitHub co-pilot for that. No, sorry, um, Marcel stays using my co-pilot for that. And also trying to get a prompt recipe. What should this prompt kind of include? But then actually, as I'm I'm talking to this AI series, it's like, no, no, actually, we are much more capable now so that you don't really have to follow a structure. The most important thing is that you get everything in there. So what I found is because I want to give it to the audience, right? You make sure you have this and this and this and this and that, and this is a recipe, and you just fill in the lines and then off you go. You don't really need that. What you need is the information in a prompt. And it could be like, okay, so I am thinking about doing this and this, da da da. It can be just a natural you talking to it. And actually, I would recommend I um just downloaded something called Whisper, which is now on my phone or my computer, that allows me to do to talk to anything, any text input field, I just hit a keyboard shortcut and I can speak directly to it, which also allows you to kind of ramble a little bit more. But then as you iterate through, ask it what you have not told it about. And I think that's the most important thing to always make sure that you edit and you go back and you ask it, what is it that I haven't thought about? And they will say, Well, you didn't really tell me anything about security. Okay, this is what I want. Because it's not like your app is not gonna have security. It's just if you don't mention anything specific about security, AI
Zero To Hero: Planning With AI
SPEAKER_03is gonna make it up for you. So it's not like it's not gonna be done or there's not gonna have any security, but it's it's gonna just do a generative, usually apps like yours have this security structure and it's gonna implement that. So I think the more specific you can be, the more information you can give it, the better it is. But then especially with vibe.perhaps.com, it's gonna give you something nonetheless. It's just not gonna be specific to your use case. So I think that's an important uh thing to think about. And also a new, I didn't know that. So this was last week that I just discovered, ah, okay, so prompting and prompt engineering was very important a few months ago. It's no longer as important as these models grow and have more data to work on, it's not as important anymore. Which is, I think, a good thing, especially for me, because I'm I'm this it's not in my toolbox to have the patience to write a good prompt. It's just not my personality.
NickYeah, so it's more like getting getting getting the AI to do the pro like write the prompts for you, but at least you're validating what it's coming up with.
SPEAKER_03That's important. So that's what I'm doing. I'm outsourcing to AI what I'm not good at, which I think it's a good strategy for any work with AI. Outsource the things that you're worst at and make it do that for you. So structuring a good prompt and creating that system prompt, if you will, that you put into spec. Yeah, that can you can do that for me. And then I can just rant to it in natural language. Best of wolves word world. Now, uh, I also watched Scott's uh recording, or sorry, I watched it live actually, and I sent it to all my team because he was actually
Start With Specification, Then Prompt
SPEAKER_03doing a kind of the same thing you were doing, just from Visual Studio Code.
NickOkay.
SPEAKER_03So he started with Visual Studio Code and he showed how he'd how he has set up. He's created his own agents. They have names from uh the IT crowd. So they all have different jobs. So you have the Dan is kind of the the manager or the orchestrator, uh, and then of course you have yeah, Moss and yeah, so um, and then giving them tasks to do, being autonomous, uh sending them off, letting them work overnight, creating a code app with a PowerPages site with the data model and security model and everything, also using Playwright MCP server to test it. And also I know he's been working on another few cool things about kind of UI testing and stuff, which is really, really cool. Um, so definitely a setup that I'm really envious of because he had so many skills, like the MD files, the structure was like crazy. And then also he sent uh a link to the PowerPlatform GitHub repository. They have so many tools already built that you can just go and grab. I didn't know that. That was a great uh kind of resource. But yeah, very uh, you know, of course, with Scott is always double speed, so you probably have to watch it on half speed and pause it and play it again to kind of get the setup right. But I'm and also he had a kind of six-step process to set this up for yourself that you can follow with yeah, you need no JS and you need this, and you and install the power platform tools and and all on that. So uh yeah, definitely worth um worth a watch, both you and his. And I'll also I need to go through the rest of them because I know that um, yeah, it's always the serial hero is always quality, quality content.
NickSo yeah, and there's a few others too that I need to get caught up on. And like Victor's great at like kind of corralling all of us to do these uh sessions. And I think I think I think Huntingford has a session in there as well, uh Eric Silvey. So yeah, it's uh just a great a lot of great resource of information. Um again, just so much to watch and get through. That's the problem, right?
SPEAKER_03Chris's one is on Frontier. Now we talked about that, remember, a few episodes ago. So it's been doing this for quite some time, and I think there's a few more to
Prompting Is Evolving: Focus On Info
SPEAKER_03come. So make sure to check that out. And also, speaking of Visual Studio Code and uh vibe engineering for PowerPages, there was some huge news this week, and of course, you also, clickbaity master Nick Dolman, is looking for likes, people, and clicks. So tell people what you did.
SPEAKER_01I actually had uh PowerPages clients ask me about this. Uh what's going on? So, like, whoops.
SPEAKER_04So you're scaring people, like leaving by fear, yeah, leading by fear. Come on.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so totally that's how you and to be honest, that that video did really well.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, but you know stop scaring people.
NickYeah, uh so the the the big news there was building power page burying power pages sites that came from Microsoft used with AI using agentic coding tools preview. So when when copilots first came out like a year, year and a half ago, yes, there was a co-pilot to create a PowerPages site. It wasn't really not the greatest thing in the world. So, of course, you see something like this, you're like, okay, whatever. But this actually it's using, well, they actually uses GitHub Copilot now as well, but Cloud Code, we we had seen a preview of this a few weeks ago, so it's kind of surprising that they turned it around to a public preview so fast. But the idea here is you use cloud code in the terminal, you again describe the site that you want to build, very similar to it's gonna build a single page application, PowerPages site. So I basically, but not only does it create the site that you can upload into PowerPages and be hosted and use those, the security features, web permission or table permissions, web roles, and all that fun stuff, it will go through. It will create the user interface. It will go through and create the data model for you, which kind of blew
Agents Building Apps And Tests
Nickme away. It described the tables, the relationships, the structure. It also kind of configured the authentication in a sense, it wired in the login, logout. It did it automatically with entra ID. You still, if you're gonna use anything like enter external ID or Okta or all these other things, you still have to configure that kind of the traditional way. But still, it could recognize that and add the login logout buttons appropriately. Also set up web roles and table permissions, and also did the Dataverse API stuff. So if you'd watch one of my previous videos where I created a single-page application using GitHub Copilot, I had to still prompt my way through that whole process in terms of, okay, we have the site created. Cool. Now we want to wire it to Dataverse. Okay, here's the JavaScript I need to, like, or the helper file here, and it did it, but it needed a bit of help and guidance on the way. I still went into the back end and created the table permissions, the web roles, the site settings for the web API. And then I still had to set up the authentication and I still had to prompt my way through the authentication. And even then, when I did it like a month and a half ago, it's I still had to go back a few times and reiterate that because I never got it right until I was really specific on it. And I got it done, and I have a video on that. It's a tutorial on SPAs and everything. And it's still very valid. But then I did use this Claude Code thing and it kind of created that whole site for me. I barely touched the keyboard. I essentially used the same prompt that I started with on my original SPA experiment with GitHub Copilot, and Claude Code went and pretty much did the whole thing. Now, along the way, it kept, okay, here's what I'm thinking for the data structure. Do you agree with this? I read through it. Yeah, that makes sense. Or no, I need to circle back. Here's what we're thinking for the security structure. Does this make sense? Here's what we're thinking for the UI. And I could have just said yes to all, but I like the fact that it kept coming, that human in the loop. And it took a couple, like probably
Repo Tools And Setup Paths
Nicktook a couple hours to go through the whole thing. Now, that being said, it got about maybe a quarter of the way. And it's like, yeah, you've used up all your cloud allocation for the day. And this was on like the $20 a month plan. I'm like, seriously, dude? I have to wait till I have to wait till noon. Okay, so I this was a Saturday, so I did a few other good at noon, kicked off the processing. Okay, we're gonna finish up. And then, yeah, probably a little bit later, nope, we're run out again. And like, okay, I have to wait to six o'clock the night. Okay, I'm not gonna do that anymore. I so I upgraded to the max plan, which I think you can either get five times or twenty times. I got the the five times. So I was able to go through and finish it off. So A, it was really cool that it could do it. It was not so cool that it burned through a lot of tokens and things. I circled back to Microsoft and sort of the feedback there was, yeah, they recognized that. They said with the GitHub co-pilot, you can actually pick the model that you're gonna use. So you could use a lesser model, but then of course, it's maybe not gonna do as good of a job or it's gonna work out a little bit differently. So again, this is it's all about balance, right? I believe in Claude Code now, I think that the model, the model switching is there as well where I can specify the model. But overall, I was kind of like, this is what my job's gonna
Big News: Power Pages With Agents
Nickbe. It's gonna be more iterating, it's gonna be more planning, designing, confirming, but getting it to do all the work. So it's it's uh check out, like check out the link from Microsoft to DocWit, check out my video. It's it's a bit of a long one, but uh it was a it was kind of a lot of fun. Put it, you can put it on double speed. I sped up a lot of the parts where Claude was just chugging away. Um, but it is it's kind of this is sort of way I feel things are going. And I also know there was some feedback and some comments about um and from Megan Walker, who we talk about a lot. And Megan's a you know, a friend of ours, and she said, okay, I kind of like that whole process of building an app from scratch or building a site from scratch. Like, am I the only one feeling this way? And like, no, I totally identify like that. It's that create, like, we feel with these tools the creative process is being sometimes a little bit taken away from us, like the fun stuff, like get AI to do the dishes so I can do art. And I think software development can be the same way. But on the flip side, I don't know anybody that really likes going through and tediously creating Dataverse tables and all the fields. Like, I'd rather write the piece of code that does something cool than to be do all this tedious stuff. So there's some other, there's a whole other project I'm working on that I'm really not really ready to share yet, but it's more of a fun kind of thing. But the fact that I can do it with AI, I've gotten 10 times done faster than I would have the traditional way. And to me, that is feeding my creativity because now I can try things out a lot faster. I can get it to create the dataverse tables and that structure. So I don't need to spend
Data Models, Auth, And Permissions
Nickhours on that where I could be doing the more fun stuff. So again, it's like with all these tools, yeah, yes, you can, you know, maybe do some stuff, but you can still do a lot of it by hand. And the fact that it's generating code that you can see, if I slap a can like a gallery on a canvas, that's great, it does all that. But I I can sort of look at the YAML code. This way, if I'm vibe coding something, then I actually can see the code. I can see the HTML and the JavaScript. Then I can actually learn because I'm learning a ton from it, but also I can begin to adjust it myself a little bit. So it is a completely different way of developing, creating, but I still I strongly believe you can still apply a lot of your creative energies towards it. It just depends on how you mix and what your perception is. But yeah, so circling back, that was a yeah, it was clickbaity. I apologize, but I'm probably gonna do it again.
SPEAKER_03Oh yeah, you probably will. And it's working. So I mean, but I know, and I I think about this a lot. What we you were just saying about the creativity. Where does creativity come from? When am I creative? Because if I'm honest with you, kind of lately just scrolling through LinkedIn, I feel like everyone's crushing it and I'm not. And there's a lot of AI content, which I don't want to do, and I feel like I'm falling behind and I'm not creative, and I don't have the because I used to feel like it was fun that I had something to to to say that I had a need to express myself. And nowadays uh it makes me nauseous to school through LinkedIn, and so I don't feel good about it, and so I I leave it, and then that's a whole different thing. But I mean, I think a lot of people are feeling a lot of anxiety and weird kind of symptoms from everyone using AI, or like you know, circling back to to Louise Freeze is kind of everyone's doing it, but then no one's really doing it, but then everyone wants everyone to think that they're doing it, and a lot of what we see is kind of AI sloppy, some of it is good, and now the coughing. No, no, but I mean it's um
Human In The Loop And Token Burn
SPEAKER_03it is is something that is top of mind because and I do I do agree with it. No one really wants to sit there and come figure it out. So no, I my point is that I think we're all of us are are experiencing a lot of symptoms from this AI thing. And I think to just sit with yourself a little bit to understand what about the creative process is it that I value? What is it about the customer relationship that I appreciate the most? Maybe you don't get to set this the code the app up from scratch, but what you do get what I find is that some project or a lot of projects, they stop at phase one because everyone's sick of it, and then you're now we get to phase three. Things that were hard before isn't hard anymore. So I mean, if you can if there's a positive upside to that that you feel comfortable with, then maybe that's an avenue to go through. For me, it's like I'm now abstracting myself from the cult. I'm now venturing into more of the business um side of things to help customers because I understand the architecture. So for me to be an architect and be a technical architect and not code anymore, it's is more of a um kind of it it is something that I really enjoy doing. It's really something I'm passionate about and where I have a lot of experience and I have a lot to contribute with. No, I won't be able to use all the cool agents that we saw from Scott Studio. Probably that's gonna be a hobby for me because I'm not gonna be as fluent in it uh as the developers are, so I'm not gonna be paid to do it, but I can still do it on my free time and I can do it as a pet project. What I do for a living and where I produce value for my customer is gonna be somewhere else. And I just have to find out what that is a combination of the things that I can produce where I'm valuable, where my time is valuable, and also what I enjoy doing. So and I think every one of us just kind of have to sit with it a little bit to find out what that is.
NickYeah. Yeah, it's
Creativity, Tedium, And Learning From AI
Nicka it's gonna be it's an adjustment. Like for me, it was an adjustment. And again, again, but we're all still trying to figure it out. I do not call myself an expert in this area at all. I sometimes have the tagline, I'm an AI explorer. I love exploring this stuff. But in two weeks, my knowledge and perception could be different than it is this week. The speed is concerning of how fast things are evolving. And we've talked about this as well. And it's like uh, you know, almost afraid to take a two-week vacation because how far behind will you be? But then again, but then on the flip side, you work with some clients and they're not anywhere near ready in the real world. There are some that are just dipping their toes. We've talked about this before. So there is a bit of a disparity between the Microsoft, ooh, look at this new great new thing. I get it, and talk to a client, hey, what about this new thing? They're like, no, like give us this our app. We need it to work a certain way. Or yeah, we'll maybe kind of we'll we'll consider an agent here. And that's what we talked about before about embedding agents and model-driven apps. And I think that's how the things will evolve. But it is uh, yeah, I know we we keep harping on this every week, but I think what like, yeah, it's uh I like to keep reminding ourselves, don't get down on ourselves because I think we're all in the same boat, very much like Louise's thing. Like we're all talking about it, we're all bragging about it, but really like, yeah, we're not really doing it.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, yeah. But I think I love the way you say, you know, the explorer part. I think we're all there. And I saw somewhere, and I can't remember what it is, the three C's. So you start with chaos, and then there is some consistency, there's some standards to kind of uh crystallize, and then you get uh the the speed and the drive, and then everyone's going off on it. But then we're still in the chaos phase. And as long as we're in that chaos phase, none of us should settle down, none of us should say I'm an expert. If you get to the level that you're an expert at this, sorry, dude, but you're off on the wrong path. None of you shouldn't be enable you're an expert in any of this. You should
Anxiety, Hype, And Finding Your Lane
SPEAKER_03explore and and know the surface of a lot of things, and then once this thing kind of settles down a little bit, then it's finding your thing, honing in on it, then becoming the expert, and then run like crazy in that direction. That's kind of how it works. So I I'm comfortable being in the explorer phase. And I I love that you said that you're in the AI Explorer because I think we all should be. And I think it's a good mindset to have. But uh, okay, so let's just round this off um before we kind of take up everyone's time. I just wanted to mention one short thing that I I am an expert in, and that is running hackathons because I've been doing it for a yeah, absolutely you're an expert. And I love doing it, and it's a passion of mine. And actually, I was I had the good fortune of being a guest on the CRM Rocks podcast again. And I just wanted to mention it because they allow me to talk for eons about running uh hackathons. So for anyone who's interested in kind of what's important to think about, how it all works, some stories from the trenches, and what it's like to be on the inside of uh hosting a hackathon like ACDC Arctic How Developer Challenge, check that out. And it's always so cool to be part of CRM Box. They've been at it for so long, and just oh, kudos to Marcus and Mullen, which is helping them at the moment, which um yeah, I'm just uh stoked uh to be allowed to be a guest. So check that out. Awesome.
NickThat's so cool.
SPEAKER_03Right, and then you're off to check in and weigh in, and I'm off to caring for two now very restless sick kids, which they also always do. Um they have uh now square eyes because they've watched uh scream for the whole thing. So I'm gonna square eye like that.
SPEAKER_01I'm gonna use that.
SPEAKER_03Square eyes. That's what my mom used to say when I was a kid. Yeah, you watch too much TV, your eyes are gonna go square. And if you need to pee, I can see it in your eyes because your eyes go yellow.
SPEAKER_01Awesome.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, there you go.
SPEAKER_01Cool.
SPEAKER_03All right, next episode is gonna be in two weeks. And we can say this as a bit of a there might be a surprise between now and then. And we're not gonna say anything else. Okay.
SPEAKER_01Stay
Explorer Mindset Over “Expert” Claims
SPEAKER_01tuned.
SPEAKER_04For a surprise, maybe okay. Okay.
SPEAKER_03Send me the link to the line feed so that I can watch you lift and uh yeah, and um beast around. And everything.
SPEAKER_01Thanks, everybody. Thanks, Eterk. I will uh talk to you later.
SPEAKER_04Catch you later, everybody.
SPEAKER_01Bye. Thank you for listening.
NickUh if you like this episode, please make sure you share it with your friends and colleagues in the community. And be sure to leave a rating and or a review on your favorite streaming service. That makes it easier for others to find it. Follow us on social platforms and make sure you don't miss a single episode. Thank you for listening to the Power Platform Boots Podcast with your hosts, Lurika Akebeck and Nick Dolman. See you next time for your timely boost of Power Platform news and updates.
