Power Apps Vibe

Status: Public Preview — behaviour may change.

What it does

An AI-native authoring surface at vibe.powerapps.com where you describe a business problem in natural language and it produces a plan, a data model and a working app with generated code. Plan, data and app stay linked, so a change to one updates the others. When you want out of the generated experience, you can download the source and convert the app into a Power Apps code app and carry on in your own IDE.

Key facts

Microsoft is steering people off it (September 2026). The overview page now carries an IMPORTANT note saying app building is available in Copilot Cowork and will roll out to Copilot Studio soon, and that those are the recommended experiences going forward. Vibe hasn't been retired, but it is no longer the direction of travel.
Reached through vibe.powerapps.com, or from the maker portal via Try new experience (Preview) — which you have to re-enable at every sign-in if you go that route.
A tenant admin must switch on Copilot in Power Apps (preview) in Power Platform admin centre tenant settings first.
Not available in the default environment. At preview it runs only in US, Australia, Asia and India regions, and only in English.
Microsoft recommends enabling External Models (Anthropic models) per environment for better output quality — Environments > Settings > Features > Enable External Models.
Three modes matter in the prompt box: straight generation, Plan mode (review and discuss before anything changes), and Enhance prompt to expand a thin description before generating.
Download source in the app editor gives you a zip. From there pa app init, pa app run, npm run build, pa app push turns it into a code app.
Converting creates a new, disconnected app. Changes in the code app never flow back to the vibe app or its plan. It's a one-way door.
Vibe-generated apps may reference images on res-dev.cdn.officeppe.net, res-sdf.cdn.office.net and cdn.hubblecontent.osi.office.net. Those hosts must be allowlisted in the code app Content Security Policy in the target environment or images silently disappear after conversion.
Conversion prerequisites are developer tooling, not maker tooling: Node.js LTS, the Power Apps CLI, an IDE, and an environment with code apps enabled.

When to use / skip

Use it for the front half of a build — getting from a vague requirement to something a stakeholder can click, fast, with the data model roughed in. It's genuinely good at collapsing the discovery-to-prototype gap, and Plan mode makes it usable in a workshop rather than just a demo.

Skip it as a delivery mechanism today. Preview, region-limited, English-only, no default environment, and a one-way conversion. If the app matters, treat vibe as the sketch and the code app as the deliverable — and budget for the conversion, because it isn't a button.

Configuration decisions

Whether to enable external models. It's an environment-level switch that sends work to Anthropic models. Better output, and a conversation your client's security function will want to have first, not after.
Which environment. Not the default one, and it has to be in a supported region — which for a lot of European clients rules the whole thing out at preview. Establish this before you scope anything.
Where the app is meant to end up. Decide at the start whether this is a throwaway prototype or the seed of a code app. The answer changes how much effort is worth spending inside vibe, because none of that polish survives cleanly.
Who converts, and when. The conversion needs a developer. If nobody on the account can run a CLI, vibe's output has no exit.
CSP allowlisting in the target environment, if the generated app uses stock imagery.

Gotchas

Don't start a client on vibe now without saying out loud that Microsoft has pointed at Copilot Cowork and Copilot Studio instead. A preview the vendor has already recommended moving away from is a different risk conversation from a preview that's simply early.
The disconnection at conversion is the one that hurts. Teams convert early, keep iterating in vibe because it's faster, then discover the two apps have diverged with no merge path.
power.config.json has to be salvaged by hand — copy connectionReferences and databaseReferences out, delete the file, run pa app init, paste them back into the new one. Miss it and the converted app has no data.
Missing images after conversion look like a broken build. They're a CSP problem, and nothing in the error output says so.
Re-enabling the preview experience on every sign-in through the maker portal makes people think it's been withdrawn. Use the direct URL.
English-only is not a soft limitation. It's the prompting language, and it's the reason non-English-speaking teams get poor results and blame the model.

Consultant notes

The September 2026 pointer to Copilot Cowork changes the recommendation. If a client is choosing today rather than already mid-flight, look at the Cowork app skill first and treat vibe as the fallback for what Cowork can't do yet — not the default.
Sell it as an accelerator for the requirements phase, never as a build tool. The demo is spectacular and clients will hear "we don't need developers"; the conversion path proves the opposite, so show that in the same session.
The region restriction is the first question to ask, before anyone gets excited. A UK or EU tenant with no US/APAC environment cannot use this today, and finding that out after a scoping workshop is an avoidable embarrassment.
Post-go-live risk sits entirely in the one-way conversion. Anything that reaches production must be the code app, with the vibe app formally retired — otherwise you end up supporting a shadow copy that a business user keeps editing.
Sequence it early and hard-stop it. Vibe for week one, convert, then normal code-app ALM. Teams that let vibe run alongside development spend the project reconciling two versions of the same app.

Preview feature Microsoft is already pointing away from — revisit when app building lands in Copilot Studio, or if vibe gets a retirement date.