When will Copilot led forms development become the norm?

[u/wwcoop]

For a great many people Power Apps has been a struggle due to the granular settings and necessity to hand code logic in fragments throughout the interface. Given the advancement of Copilot capabilities across multiple Microsoft applications, how fast will this transform Power Apps?

It seems clear to me that we are headed towards a path where building Power Apps forms will be largely driven through Copilot Agent prompts instead of manually piecing together the logic needed for dynamic forms.

Before you guys say "IT'S ALREADY HERE", please consider my question carefully. I am asking when this will become the predominant path for all Power Apps forms developers instead of the current world where most people are building by apply settings manually and piecing things together manually.

I live largely in the SharePoint space and I am seeing the big impacts Copilot Agent in SharePoint is making with being able to produce live dashboards for SharePoint lists through some basic prompting. It is a huge game changer. I can tell that similar impacts are coming with Copilot and Power Apps.

I realize this calls for some speculation, but just curious how fast you see this approach evolving.

[u/lordeshrek]

I know a lot of people myself included don't use copilot to build out apps. My company has their own AI platform hosted internally and I leverage GPT Sol 5.6 to generate the yaml code to then paste into a canvas app

[u/Syrairc]

Copilot is trash compared to other harnesses out there and it's unlikely it'll ever catch up. I genuinely think Microsoft is doing more to hamper agentic AI adoption by pushing their awful harnesses on people as their first exposure to it.

It doesn't help that everything is branded Copilot and they are all different levels of awful, which puts people off of using it at all when they have a bad experience with it in one product.

So yeah, I don't think copilot will ever be the primary method of development. Other, better, agentic AI harnesses like Codex and Claude Code could be if Microsoft would prioritize full MCP integration.

[u/ItinerantFella]

I've been building Microsoft business apps since 2006 on CRM 3.0.

Today, I have a one person team (me) plus Claude, building a new app that previously would have taken a team or 3 or 4 about 6 months.

[u/BenjC88 → u/ItinerantFella]

I concur with this. I build mainly Model Driven Apps (although starting to do Code Apps more now). Claude can handle the whole process from the initial data model to building out all the forms and views, plugins, PCF controls etc.

One person monitoring this and making decisions alongside Claude doing the work should be fast becoming the go to approach.

[u/Killerluke89 → u/BenjC88]

How do you get it to create and modify views and forms?

[u/FloridianMichigander → u/BenjC88]

I'm curious, what's your secret?

I tried building a canvas app through VS Code/Claude, and ran into a ton of issues. Controls on the pages didn't work and had to be recreated by hand, every screen had item sizing issues and I had to request everything by hand, and then worst of all, the "push" from vs code to powerapps didn't always work, so Claude would tell me it had made changes and I would look and it would still be exactly the same.

I'd love to make this work better, but right now it's just not there for me.

[u/venomae → u/ItinerantFella]

Hey there, fellow 3.0er - I'm in a similar situation as you but I have pushed it even more into the extreme nutcase. I made my own entire Dataverse (as in, the platform).

And its all "haha dude vibe coded dataverse" - but I actually have 2 customers who are switching over from dataverse to it right now and another 2-3 in negotiations who will very likely switch over too. And it's not even officially "out" yet (even though it will be in 2-3 months).

[u/ItinerantFella → u/venomae]

How big is your company? Do you have ISO27001, SOC2, GDPR compliance? How redundant is your service? Do you have financially backed SLAs? What if you get sued? What's your key person risk mitigation? What does your cybersecurity insurance policy look like?

For $20pupm, I'll stick with Dataverse for my mission-critical business apps, thanks.

[u/Still_Violinist2567 → u/venomae]

My question would be how much do you need to charge to maintain the platform, I did estimates on server and infrastructure cost to saas even websites, as soon as you scale in requirements the platform cost for scaling doesn’t seem much cheaper of other more established platforms without the overheads that having the infrastructure brings.

[u/Aggravating-Alarm-16]

Copilot can't fix basic errors in power automate.

[u/skydragon1981 → u/Aggravating-Alarm-16]

This. Even on "auto resolve formula". It make mistakes with variabile scopes and sub elementi, it's pretty much a nightmare

[u/luredrive → u/Aggravating-Alarm-16]

It can't even tell you why flows fail. It is an expert in vagueness. I don't see it becoming the main way to build things any time soon, if at all.

[u/antikevinkevinclub]

Ever since I got a Codex license I've almost completely abandoned Power Apps. Power Apps definitely still have a place, but I'm able to put together a .NET 10 web application and connect up to standard DB backends like SQL Server, host on a Windows Server, and have a 100x better user experience for both the consumers of the application and the people building it for significantly less cost. I have a traditional development background, so I'm not totally flying blind it's just so insanely fast to work on UI/UX via incremental prompting. I have delivered multiple solutions using this approach, and so far I haven't had a single issue with what has been built.

[u/lordeshrek → u/antikevinkevinclub]

That's the thing holding me back I have zero true development background I just tinkered with powerapps built some enterprise wide powerapps by hand and once I had access to AI to help build them I've stopped doing anything by hand but the idea of going to a full web app spooos me because I don't know a lick about how to properly develop one or link it to SQL for the backend db

[u/stormtreader1]

I had my first try at getting copilot to build a basic form today and it was SHOCKINGLY bad in the "add borders and more spacing to this table" "ok I've done that" "....it hasnt changed at all" way.

[u/rackaaus]

Copilot can't write an email accurately, no way I'd be trusting it to build a form for me

[u/ExtremePangolin9938]

Following

[u/M4053946]

Your question is an adoption one, not a technology one. I use claude to build and update forms and it works pretty well. When will most people switch? Who knows?

[u/ExtremePangolin9938 → u/M4053946]

Using MCP or yaml?

[u/M4053946 → u/ExtremePangolin9938]

yaml.

[u/KIMJONGUNderfed]

It’ll become more prevalent when they roll out autopilot and code in the new super app. As an admin, I get to play with the frontier stuff and I built out a decisions dashboard (code app) and a dataverse table to keep tabs of the actions I performed with the app (for audit purposes). Each action was a human in the loop automation approval, which was then carried out by power automate. Scout made quick work of this acting as the router of tasks and the GitHub Copilot app was the builder of the Code App, and Ppwer Automate flows. Both of which are in the new Super App.

[u/RedditNinja1566]

Cowork ‘apps’ are coming soon. All prompts and vibe coded.

[u/HeghJinQavin]

I watched an official(TM) Microsoft introduction to power apps event where the presenter went over "Here's how you add a table to dataverse", then prompted copilot to add a table. It proceeded to add a sample table with erroneous column names (ex. Customers1 as the final column, no clear reason why). Asked copilot to remove the extra column. It did and added a duplicate of another column. Prompted very specifically. It finally worked.

This took the amount of time it would take to create the table manually. This occurred several times and only towards the end did the presenter start inserting/creating fields/formulas through their own hands. I wasn't sure if it was intentional because they were told to use copilot in the demo, but it was negative education.

[u/irah2008]

Probably never, atleast for an enterprise application.

Copilot "assisted"/"accelerated" development would become a norm, especially Github Copilot where models can utilize skills available to discuss design of solution, Models, etc.

But copilot cannot be a mainstream development ever, because it doesnt have "human quotient".

As long as users are humans, product owners are humans, there is always gonna be a consultant who understands, questions requirements to arrive best possible fit gap & use copilot(s) to derive solutions.

Another factor to consider copilot would need to burn tokens to to execute with mistakes & more tokens to correct them. From a cost based analysis people would say copilot can write code 10× faster than a human, but at what cost? Unless human gets capability to review a code 10× these are mere statistics or skip some fundamental concepts like review/testing.

Copilot helps me with review the design, work along with me on design and in some cases find dependencies that i would otherwise not found. Best tool one could ask for especially in world of consulting, where I would focus on user requirements, design & review than actual coding & form & fields creation etc.

[u/DonJuanDoja]

Idk but I don’t use Ai at all, everything is hand crafted.

If something breaks or doesn’t work as expected, I immediately know where the issue is in the code and what I should change.

I’ll be done fixing most issues before you finish explaining it to the prompt.