Vibe Coding in Power Apps – Is this something for you?

As a software developer, I like to have control over what I get. Does Vibe Coding give you what you expect? In this post I’m gong through some of the experiences that you might have had too. Will Power Apps Vibe coding work for you?

Introduction into Vibe coding

To use the vibe coding options offered in the Power Platform you will need to visit https://vibe.powerapps.com type in your prompt and your app is built within minutes.

If you submit the same prompt twice you will get two completely different looking apps.

Is this a problem?

When I first started with SharePoint 2007 many companies wasted a lot of money on making their SharePoint match their corporate branding. Pixel perfect is what it had to be, even though pixel perfect is like a unicorn when you want to support multiple browsers.

The two above apps may still look fairly similar but every time you run the same prompt you will get slightly different results.

Now how do we resolve this?

My prompt so far was simple.

Create an app that I can use to register all my tasks. I need to have a due date that I can set and update at any time and when I completed my task I can complete it

But if we enhance it a bit then we can see that we already get control over the colours that the vibe coding engine is taking

Create an app that I can use to register all my tasks. I need to have a due date that I can set and update at any time and when I completed my task I can complete it. Use my company colour scheme which uses the following colours: #FF0000 #00FF00 and #0000FF. Black and white can be used for text

This now results in an app like this:

Now the first thing that I don’t like is the top section. It is using too much space. We can correct that with a simple prompt.

Make the search, status, due date range and sort by all appear next to each other to reduce the use of space for this.

This shows how vibe coding works. You start with a base app and then slowly adjust the Vibe Coded App to your needs. But that is quite often not how people work.

Many people need to write out the full requirements. By not being specific enough in my initial prompt I ended up with useability issues as shown below when I hover over a task.

The above issue we can quite quickly fix with the following prompt.

When hovering over a task all text should be easy to read. Not like the black on blue

And this makes the app straight away look a lot better. Potentially the hover over colour could be slightly darker but I will leave that for now.

Now imagine that we had created all of our prompts in one go. We can simply copy our prompts together, but you might want to consider using the enhance prompt option as well ( the most left icon of the three little icons below the prompt)

The generated prompt does look a lot more complete..

Design a task management app for individual users to register, view, and manage tasks. Each task should have a title, description, and a due date that can be set and updated at any time. Users can mark tasks as completed, and completed tasks should be visually distinguished. Implement features to edit, delete, and filter tasks by status (active/completed) and due date. The UI must use the company colour scheme: #FF0000 (red), #00FF00 (green), and #0000FF (blue) for primary elements such as buttons, highlights, and headers, with black and white for text and backgrounds to ensure readability. Include responsive design for desktop and mobile, clear feedback for actions (e.g., task added, updated, completed), and an intuitive interface for quick task entry and management.

Our app is looking slightly better again. But more importantly very different.

Debugging issues

Yes Vibe Coding also comes with bugs We saw earlier the poor decision resulting in black text on dark blue backgrounds but in the next part of this post I will look at adding images to the tasks.

But if we ask for a bit of imagination, things become a little harder to implement

Add a relevant image to each task.

I ended up with image place holders but no actual images.

I gave it a second attempt, but didn’t really succeed. Do we have to jump into the code?

Well we just have to be more specific in what we are asking for.

That’s not right. I would like to have an image that is relevant to the task title. e.g. if the task is call plumber then put a plumbing picture next to the task title.

But still no luck.

Then I tried again and actually found a bug that was fixable. See in the comments on the left for the cause of the issue.

Vibe coding is a bit like talking to a genie. You get exactly what you are asking for. So ask for the right thing and you might get what you want, but there could still be coding issues slip into your app. However don’t give up just keep pushing for fixes and you will get them.

Pros and Cons of Vibe Coding

Vibe coding will probably never make all developers happy. But imagine if we can build useful apps by just using our own language. It would make development a lot easier. Potentially you could have an international group of developers who don’t speak each other’s language develop a single app. Although agreeing on the requirements could be a bit of a challenge.

Pros

The pros are easy to find. The speed at which we can develop an app may remove any need for manual coding.

There is no need to learn programming languages (as long as everything works)

Cons

In my many years of developing software, I’ve always made sure that there are some escape routes for me when I’m stuck or when something goes wrong. Imagine that I’m not understanding the code that is being generated, what is my escape route to making a broken app work?

I’m also missing the control over the finer details. Even though the vibe coding on vibe.powerapps.com can be impressive, can I really get things done when I ask for very specific things? Of course I would escape into the code, but that isn’t something we can ask any citizen developer to do.

As we saw in this post, asking for the same thing twice will give you often two different results. It is just like asking two developers for something they will give you something completely different.

Will human understandable code become a thing that is unnecessary in the near future? Who knows.