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Review - First Impressions of Vibe.PowerApps.Com

One of the most exciting announcements at Microsoft Ignite was Power Apps Vibe - a new way to create code apps using natural language alone.

How well does this work in reality? I've been experimenting with this feature for the past several days and here are my initial findings.

Creating an app with Vibe.PowerApps.Com

To see how well Vibe works, I attempted to recreate one of the challenges from the PowerUp program: the Parking Challenge. The requirement of this challenge is to build an app for parking inspectors to carry out inspections, allow users to make parking requests, and to store vehicle details.

To create an app, we go to vibe.powerapps.com and type our requirements into the chat box.

The first limitation is that uploading documents isn't supported, and there’s a 4,000-character limit. This makes it challenging to provide detailed instructions in one go. Hopefully, this restriction will be lifted as the product improves. 

After entering the requirements, Vibe enlists various agents in a process that feels similar to building an app using Power Apps Planner. 

At the end of this process, Vibe generates an app that looks visually appealing and functional (as illustrated beneath). I was impressed.



Modifying Data Entry Controls in Vibe Apps

Once the app is created, we use natural language to apply additional customisations. 

The first customisation I wanted was to change some of the data entry controls in the app.
When entering the Parking Inspection, the auto-generated app contained a drop-down control control. This made it difficult to work against large number of records, so I wanted a combo box with look-ahead search instead. 

I asked the designer for this modification (as shown below), and Vibe began to make this change.



The result of this was that it successfully changed the drop-down to a combobox with full search capabilities. It did this on the first attempt which was impressive. 


Creating Editable Grids in Vibe Apps

To provide an easy way to edit the data in the tables, I wanted to create editable grids for all tables. Vibe built this functionality with ease, including search, sort, and pagination capabilities.  




An interesting observation about the data grids is that although there were more than 500 records in my Vehicle table, the search only returned a maximum of 500 records. This is consistent with the row retrieval limit behaviour that exists with Canvas apps in Power Apps.

Creating Menu Navigation in Vibe  

We can create and modify the app navigation menus through the chat window. I easily created a sub menu with links to my table maintenance screens. 


Creating Data Validation Rules in Vibe 

To ensure users enter clean data, it's important to implement validation. For parking request records, I wanted to prevent users from entering a past date when entering a new record, but to accept a past date when editing an existing record. Vibe implemented this functionality successfully.

Another requirement was to limit parking requests to 15 per day. This requirement is more complicated because it requires counting the number of existing records for the current day when saving a new record. I doubted that Vibe could do this but surprisingly, it created this validation rule on its first attempt (as highlighted below).  



Creating Test Data in Vibe 

To test how well the app works with larger quantities of data, I wanted to populate my database with a large number of records. 

I asked Vibe to create buttons to generate sample data. For my Vehicle table, I asked it to generate sample registration numbers in UK format and to only include vehicle makes and models available in the UK. It did this correctly and at runtime, it created 100 test records in under 5 seconds - both very impressive. 

Here, we see the conversation I had with Vibe to create this functionality.



Here's a screenshot of how this feature looks at runtime.


Making Ad-hoc Presentation Changes 

For simple UI changes, we can enable the in-line editing feature by clicking the 'toggle inline edits' button in the chat panel. This enables us to select a UI element and to make changes to the font and colour. 



One thing I would have liked to have seen is the ability to edit the text directly in the designing using the in-line editor. 

At present, this isn't possible so the only way to make edits to label text is to express the change in a sentence and to enter it into the 'Ask for changes...' text box.

Undoing Changes

 If we're unhappy with what designer does and want to undo a change, we can do the natural language equivalent of clicking 'Ctrl-Z' by asking Vibe to 'undo the last change'. In my tests, the designer was able to undo changes reliably. 

Observations and Limitations of Power Apps Vibe?

What are the current limitations of Vibe.PowerApps.Com?  

One major limitation is once we create an app, it isn't possible to modify the schema of the tables. For example, I wanted to add some server-side auto generated number fields and Vibe was unable to do this, reporting that the tables were read only.


For this reason, I struggled to implement the ability to upload vehicle photos because my original table schema didn't contain an image column.

I attempted to correct this by making the table changes outside of Vibe.PowerApps.Com. However, the designer was never able to implement this functionality successfully, and gave some odd errors as the plan and data structure was out of sync. 

Versioning and ALM Limitations of Power Apps Vibe

Another limitation is that unlike Canvas apps, there’s no version history and no way to revert back to a previous version.

There’s also no way to duplicate projects/apps, which would be helpful. Features around app management and ALM are limited in this preview.

Errors with Generated Code and How to Fix

Occasionally, the designer generates code that doesn’t work. For example, when creating new screens or modifying the navigation, the running app would show a 404 error on the modified pages.

Encountering such errors for the first time feels strange as there's no way to debug or diagnose problems.

The solution to errors is to simply ask the chat to fix the problem (highlighted below). In practice, I found this usually worked on the first attempt.  



The screenshot below illustrates another example when the Code Agent failed. Again, asking the agent to retry the operation resolved the problem.

Conclusion

The preview of Power Apps Vibe is very impressive. The ability to build sophisticated apps with such ease is a game-changer,  

There are still some rough edges, particularly around data model updates, the lack of offline support, and limited ALM functionality and support. However, it's unfair to judge too harshly at this stage given that this is still in preview. 

Once these gaps are addressed, it's difficult to see why app builders would continue developing Canvas apps. I would say that building apps with Vibe is definitely seems like the future of Power Apps. 
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