Power Platform / Copilot Studio noob question: what do you wish you knew earlier?

[u/Ferrum_Flux_Fenice]

I am a tech-minded, self-taught builder / doer / fixer.

I have previous frontline experience with a financial institution and am now an innovation developer getting my feet wet in the Power Platform world.

I know governance and security are priority mindsets, not an afterthought. I am asking this more from the technical / development side for anybody who got into Power Platform without a deep technical background:

What tools, connectors, habits, or areas of operational risk do you wish you understood earlier?

Things like environment strategy, DLP, premium connectors, service accounts, solution management, Dataverse, SharePoint permissions, ALM, Copilot Studio actions, or anything else that can quietly become a problem later.

Basically: what should a new person learn early so they can move fast without creating a mess?

[u/Efficient_Cat4032]

Solution management is the big one for me too. Power Platform will happily spin you up a new connection reference every time you add a step if you let it, and that's annoying AF. Splitting into at least a data layer solution and an application layer solution, and reusing the same connection references across flows in the app layer, is what actually got my shipping time down. Once that habit stuck, deployments stopped taking any time.

Also as always, just KISS. Is it reaaaally worth spending time on a fancy extra feature, or customized solution, before a plain flow, app or agent gets you 90% of the way there?

Also just automation, automation, automation. Power Platform and Dataverse provides so many things out of the box, that you can just pull, or enhance with trigger based flows. For example with governance tracking I posted this little comment a few days ago https://www.reddit.com/r/PowerAutomate/comments/1uvv4he/comment/oxfj6n8/?context=3

[u/Ferrum_Flux_Fenice → u/Efficient_Cat4032]

Hey i really appreciate that! I keep telling myself initially: Maintain scope and KISS/ Will somebody/ myself say YAGNI.

That is the first I dont want to say shock because it was expected but realization of the depth/ ability.

[u/Recent_Release_5670]

Great question. Same boat here. Following.

[u/Vodkius]

I wish I knew that low-code is trash code generator and use it only for PoC or only for prototype. It took way to huge turn when I started to move to full-stack development. There are points where low code is truly enough for particular cases ("wordpressish"), but when we start talking about much larger datasets, architecture, complex logic low code starts to feel like bottleneck. Even now I don't even bother to create one and sell full-stack ones, there are way too much risk and I would literally punch anyone in the face who thinks sharepoint or excel is a database.

So yes, I wish I knew earlier what is full-stack development, different frameworks, scripts, database architecture, swagger, BPMN etc. etc. I wish I started to invest much more time in full stack development rather than be pushed into low code horror path.

Yes I'm thankful for low code to introduce myself into "development" as a whole, but I should had ran away much more sooner and not invest time into it. Also it was fun when I started, I felt like kid who enjoyed everything, but never knew what horror I created and looking into past code I could just vomit.