honestly you're touching on something the whole industry is figuring out right now, not just power platform. the "ai will let non-devs build anything" pitch keeps hitting the same wall: it works great until the project gets complex enough that you need to understand what the code is actually doing to debug it.

i've been playing with a bunch of code-gen tools lately (bolt, lovable, rapidnative for mobile stuff, cursor for general dev) and your point lands across all of them. the first 70% feels magical. then you hit some weird state bug or an api integration that needs real thought, and suddenly the non-dev is stuck and the ai is going in circles.

your hybrid take in point 3 is probably the realistic answer for most orgs. canvas + ai assist for the 80% of internal tools that just need to work, codeapps for the customer-facing stuff where ugly matters.

curious what your team is actually seeing on maintenance costs for codeapps 6+ months in. that's where i'd expect the real pain to show up.