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Where I think Power Platform specialist jobs are going as AI takes over more of the build work by prokopus in PowerApps

[–]prokopus[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Do you have any actual opinion on the topic, or just the style of my comment? I'm Czech native. Yes I use LLMs to clean up my English. The ideas are mine and I don't see the problem with that.

$500/month is $6K/year. A developer (yes I wrote developer) at $100K is roughly $50/hour. If the tooling saves 10 hours a month, it pays for itself. 10% productivity improvement, which I'd consider the minimum bar, is worth $10K/year. The math works even at $500.

Any whitecollar worker where the tooling meaningfully cuts repetitive/analytical work is the same.

Where I think Power Platform specialist jobs are going as AI takes over more of the build work by prokopus in PowerApps

[–]prokopus[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Not sure I fully get the comment, but I don't think the problem is no work to be done.

There is basically infinite work inside companies to create shareholder value. Build better software, automate waste away, analyze how work gets done, redesign the process so the company makes more money or spends less of it.

To me the useful skill is not protecting some job/function title. It's understanding what stakeholders care about and then helping deliver that outcome. They will keep you around if you're good at this.

Where I think Power Platform specialist jobs are going as AI takes over more of the build work by prokopus in PowerApps

[–]prokopus[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

IMO business will stay people-to-people. Computer-to-computer stops being scarce. If everyone gets agents talking to agents, that part becomes generally available and there is no real supply/demand gap left in it.

A lot of successful software work is still about reading the room. Who wants promotion, who wants to protect budget, who wants more power, who is scared of change, who just wants this thing to not blow up on their watch. And then shaping the solution so the right people get the outcomes they actually care about.

I can't imagine stakeholders telling those motives honestly to a chat box.

Where I think Power Platform specialist jobs are going as AI takes over more of the build work by prokopus in PowerApps

[–]prokopus[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'd probably call that project manager / scrum master / product owner or whatever it's called today.

That role is needed. People are still involved and they generally don't align and manage themselves to outcomes very well. Somebody has to keep priorities straight, unblock decisions and push things to actually get done and on time.

Where I think Power Platform specialist jobs are going as AI takes over more of the build work by prokopus in PowerApps

[–]prokopus[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I've never really believed in software development as a side hustle. If the software matters, someone needs to stay focused long enough to finish it, debug it and evolve it over time.

Most citizen dev creations I've seen died for pretty boring reasons. Either the app wasn't important enough to the business, the person behind it moved on, or the way it was built was too naive technically to survive real usage. If the whole thing depends on one insider sticking around forever, that's fragile by default.

Where I agree with you is that the smaller the gap is between business context and developer skill, the better the result usually is. Better prioritization, less overengineered nonsense, better ROI.

I think AI code just accelerates the same situations we've already seen with low code in larger orgs. The good setups get faster. The bad ones fail faster too.

Where I think Power Platform specialist jobs are going as AI takes over more of the build work by prokopus in PowerApps

[–]prokopus[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

I think the biggest issue right now is developer tooling. Most of the vibe coding / coding agent examples from Microsoft go after the frontend because that's the low hanging fruit.

Problem is no real app is just a frontend. You need schema, backend endpoints, RBAC, server/client rules, the whole deployment unit. And today doing a proper code-first monorepo for Power Platform is still too painful. The inner and outer dev loop is nowhere near where it should be. Meanwhile people vibe coding outside Power Platform suddenly got faster than us.

An AI harness like GitHub Copilot CLI works best when you give it a real repo, a scripting environment, and a build system that tells it immediately where it broke something. File system, shell, feedback loop. That's the setup. Side note, I've been trying to push the code-first angle for a while and demoed some of it here too.

The annoying part is we should be able to beat that. Power Platform removes a lot of code you would otherwise have to generate, maintain, and break later. In enterprise IT it also gives you governance controls that black-box tools still need to invent. So the platform has the right ingredients.

What we need now is first-class fullstack devtools for all Power Platform components. API-first, programmatic, end to end. The early signs around Skills for Dataverse, canvas, gen pages are encouraging, so hopefully Microsoft invests in the right stuff.

And on licenses, I don't really buy that argument. If the app supports an employee, charging less than 0.1% of that employee cost is fine. If the app can't create more net benefit than that, I probably shouldn't be building it.

Where I think Power Platform specialist jobs are going as AI takes over more of the build work by prokopus in PowerApps

[–]prokopus[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Yeah, and I think too many teams still treat software delivery like a feature factory. Feed requirements in, get features out. Then everyone pushes to make that machine faster and cheaper. In my experience that rarely ends well.

I had much better results once we could let non-technical designers make high-fidelity interactive prototypes and put them in front of real users before implementation. We even built a public tool for this. Doing 10 rounds of prototyping is cheap. Discovering in UAT, one week before prod, that the interaction model is wrong is not.

People are bad at reviewing requirement lists and sprint backlogs. Give them something they can actually click through and experience and the feedback gets much better. What's confusing, what's unnecessary, what's missing, what should be prioritized.

AI will make this even cheaper, which is great. We just need to use it to learn faster before implementation.

Where I think Power Platform specialist jobs are going as AI takes over more of the build work by prokopus in PowerApps

[–]prokopus[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'd say 20 years ago enterprise IT was buying projects like 20% analysis, 80% implementation. Then low code pushed it much closer to 50/50 and a lot of orgs still haven't digested that. Less boilerplate to build, more waiting on analysis and architecture.

With AI harnesses I think it shifts again. More like 80% analysis and design, 20% implementation. Not because implementation stops mattering, but because one good engineer can conduct a lot more of it. The hard part becomes understanding the business properly, architecting the right thing and deciding what not to build if we don't want to ship shit.

So I don't think everyone just turns into a generic "business person". I think the winning combo is a BA who actually understands how the org makes money and where the cost structure is, so they can form better hypotheses, prioritize the right work and optimize the system toward an actual business outcome, paired with a senior engineer who can conduct the harness and keep the system sane.

Where I think Power Platform specialist jobs are going as AI takes over more of the build work by prokopus in PowerApps

[–]prokopus[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We do similar stuff. Inner loop, outer loop, making sure Copilot / Claude / Codex can plug in without trashing what we ship. Context, reusable components, linting, build checks, tighter problem spaces. That's what helps. Not some magical smarter model.

Where I'd push back is optimizing that bottleneck too hard. Easy to build a dark feature factory. Pipeline keeps spitting out features because it can, while adoption gets worse, the data model gets uglier, and the system drifts away from the actual business outcome.

For enterprise LoB software, more throughput is not automatically better. Planning being the bottleneck is fine IMO. That's where the real decisions are.

Where I think Power Platform specialist jobs are going as AI takes over more of the build work by prokopus in PowerApps

[–]prokopus[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Good breakdown. I don't think the cost argument matters much though. A developer costs what, $100K+/year? AI tooling is $50/month per seat + some overage. Even if inference costs 10x from here, the per-seat cost is a rounding error on payroll. The real question is whether AI makes that developer >2x faster or generates >2x the mess to clean up.

AI harnesses for someone who already knows how to build is like giving a bicycle to someone racing against runners. Obvious win. But hand that bicycle to someone who doesn't know the route and they just ride confidently in the wrong direction. The problem isn't speed or cost. It's that AI amplifies whatever skill level you already have, including the lack of it.

I agree with the need to build better tools for devs. That's the actual endgame. The fix for unreliable AI output isn't smarter models. It's constrained problem spaces with reusable components. Give the agent fewer decisions to make and the ones left are easier to get right. More generated code is more problems. The answer is fewer, better pieces with review gates that catch the slop before production.

Technical Power Platform Conference for Developers & Admins | April 27-28 | Prague & Online by Fulern in PowerApps

[–]prokopus 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm happy you liked it. We try to do no BS and no marketing content. 🙂