Power BI report development is moving from manual clicks to programmatic code—an
By Irshad Yasseen A · October 30, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
Power BI report development is moving from manual clicks to programmatic code—and AI agents are helping drive this shift.
Generating your semantic model, validation layers, and responsive visual canvas directly from VS Code. With Claude Code, Fabric agent skills, and Microsoft’s new agentic development tools, analytics engineers are fundamentally changing how BI is built.
💡 The Code-First Paradigm Shift
If you've built Power BI reports, you know the workflow: dragging relationship lines, writing DAX measures, and pixel-perfecting visual cards. It’s always been visual, which meant manual.
But by moving reports into a file-based, plain-text format on your machine (Power BI Projects - .pbip), the entire workflow changes. Power Query is saved as M code, your semantic model and DAX use TMDL (Tabular Model Definition Language), and visuals are stored in modular PBIR JSON files.
Because your report is now plain text, AI agents can read, understand, and generate the foundation for your reports.
🧠 What do AI Agents do?
Instead of bypassing human review, these tools acts as the ultimate developer assistant:
The Scaffold: Generating M query scripts to clean raw datasets and auto-structuring Star Schema tables.
The Modeler: Authoring schema relationships and scaffolding standard DAX measures in text format.
The Assembler: Generating standard PBIR visual JSONs, calculating canvas coordinates, and placing cards and charts where they need to go.
The result isn't a replacement for developers—it’s the fastest start you’ve ever had. You launch your pbip file in Power BI Desktop, inspect the schema, fine-tune the visuals, and bypass hours of initial boilerplate.
🛠️ Grounding this in Reality
This is made possible by open-source tools and natural language integration. Using Claude Code or Cursor, developers can now run local MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers to edit and validate BI models directly on their machine.
By connecting Fabric Skills, AI can understand and author according to Microsoft’s own best-practice patterns.
Skills for Fabric (GitHub): Browse Microsoft’s collection of skills and MCP systems for Claude and VS Code:
https://lnkd.in/gv37Vmbn
Power BI Agentic Overview: Learn how development tools, agent skills, and custom servers collaborate:
https://lnkd.in/gVCtHxhM