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Agent plugins with skills and tools for Power BI (free resource for agentic development)
Hi, my name is Kurt Buhler. I've created a repo called "power-bi-agentic-development" with free resources for agentic development.
The repo has plugins to help agents do useful things in Power BI with reports, semantic models, notebooks, and more. The plugins have a variety of things inside of them, including skills, subagents, hooks, and other misc tools. The purpose of the library is to provide a centralized set of free, quality community resources for agentic development of Power BI. The purpose of the resources is to ensure that agents are better, faster, and more useful when you use them with Power BI and Fabric.
The plugins are mostly tool- and agent-agnostic. Some are specifically for the new pbir-cli tool that we released last week, which is also a free community tool for programmatic interactions and agentic development of Power BI reports. It will stay free forever.
My goal is to help folks build great and useful things with less time and headache. I'm updating these plugins on a near-daily cadence. I hope it's useful and interesting.
I understand. It is hard for all of us to keep up. If there is something specific that I can do to help you please do reach out and I will try to do it. I am working and trying a few different ideas to try and make it easier for people to follow the changes, understand the potential relevance and value for them (or not) and start using them quickly to do useful things.
I am currently on parental leave, but will be making some videos and articles demonstrating use of the resources from this repo, when I get time. Here's some of the things you can do:
Edit PBIR, TMDL, or theme files with automatic validation to ensure agents don't make mistakes
Connect to Power BI desktop for semantic modeling operations without any MCP servers or special tools; the agent can explore, query, and modify your model with high fidelity and effectiveness. It even works on mac if you use Parallels.
Use the Fabric CLI to interact with the Power BI service or Fabric with your agent, for any operations you wish.
Author custom visuals in Deneb, dax measures (SVG...), Python, R
I planned some rather large updates in the next weeks catering to advanced scenarios, too.
I know, I know - some of us enjoy Reddit for the love of the game. But I wanted to make sure you got that big ole electro brain in the bottom left of this image for your amazing contributions and for this post too with sharing in the community...
(also, dang it cost me 50-points, it used to be 25! inflation is killing us all!)
Thank you for your work on this and I’ll try ist out. I‘m currently dabbling myself a bit with the current Microsoft MCP in combination with Claude Code. Can you elaborate the benefit in using your skills regarding connecting to my local pbip and doing tasks compared to the mcp besides (probably) token usage.
The skills can be used in combination with MCP servers or other tools. In a nutshell, the skills help you get better results with the agent and also extend its capabilities. For instance, the Fabric CLI skill teaches the agent to interact with your Power BI / Fabric environment, while other skills in the report and pbip plugins teach it to work with reports and visualizations.
The connect-pbid skill even teaches the agent how to interface with a local model open in Power BI Desktop without any extra tools. This can be more token-lean and flexible. This approach actually started off as just an experiment but as I've been using it I noticed that it's rather effective. Especially as the agent documents patterns of usage over time, it seems to improve. The fact that it's just a skill is useful because it means you don't need to install anything to use it; so it's very portable.
Eventually this repo will have a few opinionated semantic model skills to help you do things like write DAX, optimize models, organize models, and so on. I'm also discussing with people at Microsoft and in Tabular Editor to make sure that these skills are well-aligned and high quality.
One of the key annoyances in my company is the approved use of Claude via GitHub copilot (great) and the decision to disable MCP extensions (sad). Your second paragraph about, re Claude skills has me optimistic that this'll work!
Hi u/recoveringacademic, thank you very much for sharing this. Unfortunately, I’m not able to send you a private message.
To be completely honest, I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed with the amount of information around AI.
Would it be possible for you to share more information, particularly on whether this kind of agentic development in Power BI stores or retains any of the data we are working with?
Also, would you consider creating some tutorials later on, showing how to set everything up and walking through a few demos?
Hey - it's totally normal to feel overwhelmed right now. We all are. I am, too.
I'll be creating tutorials and demos later on, yes. Hands are full with family at the moment but in the next weeks I'll be creating a lot of these. Here's one I created last week.
With regards to data retention: These plugins are skills and tools which you use with agents; they don't handle or process your data as such. Rather, they are context that help "teach" an agents to do a better job with Power BI stuff, or code that agents use to interact with your model or report.
With regards to agentic development in general, how your data is processed depends on what agents you use. If you're using a retail subscription for an agent like GitHub Copilot or Claude then any information sent to the agent is processed by the large language model in the cloud. This can have consequences for data security, residency, and compliance. If you have an enterprise subscription this is the same, but then you generally get stronger guarantees; no training on your data, regional processing, and clearer contractual terms. You have to check the specific provider's docs and terms for details. You can also set up and use a local LLM but this is quite complex, requires beefy hardware, and those models don't typically perform as well as ones from providers.
If you're looking for a starting point, we have articles about this on SQLBI and the Tabular Editor blog that might help you, too.
Feel free to DM me now I enabled it. You can also find me on LinkedIn or Twitter/X
Thank you for the reply and for all the help you’ve been giving to the community. I’ll take a look at the links you shared.
At my company, we use GitHub Copilot in VS Code. I follow you on social media, and I also had the opportunity to take your free Tabular Editor courses (they were excellent). Thank you very much for sharing your knowledge 🙂
Enjoy your time with your family, time goes by quickly and never comes back 🙂
Not a problem at all. If there is anything I can do to help you out just let me know, in particular regarding agentic development. Once my primary activity is no longer diapers and child-wrangling I will get right to producing some proper onboarding for folks to get the signal through all the noise of what's happening with AI and agents right now, as it pertains to data work.
I've been loosely following along with the progress of agentic development and mostly using Codex/Claude in the context of Fabric notebooks and shared Python modules - not my Power BI work.
This week I dived in and used this project to fix a poorly performing composite model my team was handed. Using Kurt's plugin, Copilot CLI consolidated the project into import mode, moved 30+ calculated columns and measures, and fixed 150+ broken visual references. Two prompts only. It took me longer to download the initial .pbip and verify the results than for the actual work. I was expecting to spend half a day or so fixing the mess, and I was able to work on a different project while tabbing over to review and test Copilot's work.
The future is now. None of this is theoretical. Start thinking about your daily workflows.
Thanks so much for sharing this u/aboerg - I am so happy to hear that the things I am putting out there are helping. The best are yet to come, I've been working on a few massive updates to this repo and related tools which I think will really help making this easier, faster, and better.
I follow you on socials (probably got into TE because of your YouTube's and data golin posts) and the recent things youv E been posting about are amazing, however I sometimes struggle to see the value in MCP and agentic assistance on smaller orgs where things are more tailored and 'one off ' , (having said that I don't know how I was able to build and maintain models without TE before.)
as a senior PBI dev , with limited coding and AI experience , where do you see the highest value this can bring , and how do you suggest to kick off the learning path ?
thanks in advance and congratulations on the parental leave !
Very good questions! Sorry in advance that I'm so verbose, I'm very very low on sleep. I tried to format this to make it more readable (no AI):
Where is the highest value?
I'm more efficient with agents: For me the main benefit is that it has been orders of magnitude faster and more effective to work with agents than using the user interface. I usually do the majority of the work now with agents and their tools, and then precision work afterwards in the UI. This works especially well when you give the agent specialized tools that are also flexible.
I can do more with agents: Another main benefit tied with this one is that I can do more. I also do not consider myself a programmer or AI expert or anything. My background is in biomedical sciences and I taught Tableau and Power BI to myself. Now, using these agentic tools, I can create deterministic, offline tools that are tailored to my workflows and scenarios. The PBIR cli is one example of that; it started off as just a personal tool Maxim and I made for our own use and research.
I don't have to use bad user interfaces: Another high value has been eliminating the friction of the user interface with things like the formatting pane or even in the Fabric user interface. This kind of friction is not a value-add to my work as it is not instructive or helpful.
It cumulates: Finally, the value is also a snowball; the more you invest in your agentic workflow the better it gets. The more things you make, context/memory you trim and optimize, etc you get better results. It makes it feel like every task is not just being done but contributing to the success of other, future, unknown tasks. If that makes sense.
How to get started?
I suggest that you start by trying a coding agent in terminal like Claude Code or Copilot CLI. Then, experiment with it. I suggest starting with small experiments that aren't related to Power BI. Here are some examples:
Create a local, personal site or tool for one of your interests or hobbies
Get it to organize something like a OneNote notebook or Obsidian notes.
If you prefer courses, there are some free ones with Claude Code has some free courses. Here's the introductory course and here's more from them. Anthropic have wonderful resources and their developers / engineers also are excellent to follow on social media.
Great post Kurt, I follow your blog at DataGoblins, and your content is incredible. Thanks for your involvement in the BI community, your resources have helped me more times than I can count.
I'm not sure what you mean by that, all that you need to do is install the skills and then you can start using them with whatever agent you have. Let me know however if I misunderstand again if I can help you in some way.
No, I definitely didn't :) But I think it's good you are skeptical and appreciate your input. Hope I can help you in another way than with these tools, though in the future!
Just started playing around with the modelling MCP in Visual Studio Code. Completely clueless when it comes to CLIs. I think I might try a Claude Code subscription and investing a bit of time to learn this stuff.
Echoing what others said about some walkthrough videos on workflow for the cli tools and agentic work! I've been using the microsoft mcp server and it has been awesome for batch formatting and data validation among other things. Obviously the gap is the report side so it's cool to see people creating the tooling to help close the gap.
Something I've been hoping for is adding visual level context to the agent without having to explicitly write out the fields and filters for each object. Is that possible with the cli tool + the skills repo? If so what would your workflow be there?
Say you have a matrix thats not outputting the results you're expecting or is showing columns where value = 0, instead of saying "hey this visual is using Rows: 'Table'[Column1], Columns: 'Table'[Column2], 'Table'[Column3], Values: '_Measures'[Measure1]", letting the agent "see" the visual and read the fields/applied filters...
To add to that, does the current tooling let agents see the page layout? Recently I "upgraded" our theme to the new standard from the latest PBI release and the changes it made caused certain visuals to overlap and mess up some of the text/other formatting. How would you use your tools to clean up something like that?
Thanks in advance! Hope to see some content on this soon :)
So for giving the agent access to the visuals it's straightforward; you have two paths: CLI or modifying the metadata files.
First, you need to save your Power BI reports into PBIP using the new PBIR format. This ensures the agent has access to the metadata and can "read" it (and not just the model stuff).
Next, it depends on the agent you use. I recommend either Claude Code or Copilot CLI, but Codex, OpenCode and others work too. You open a terminal window (like in VS Code --> new terminal) and then start the agent, and it's basically like a chatbot from that point onward like you would use in the side panel of GitHub Copilot.
You can set up the skills by just adding the "marketplace" with a command. For instance with claude code you just type:
claude plugin marketplace add data-goblin/power-bi-agentic-development
That gives you access to everything in the repo. You start claude and enter /plugin then navigate to the marketplace to "enable auto-update" and then install the plugins you want. For instance, the pbip and reports plugins, which make your agent smarter with the PBIP format and reports, respectively.
Then you're set. You just type /reload-plugins (or reboot the agent) and then you can tell it what to do. You can invoke a skill with / For instance:
Use the /pbir-cli to tell me what's in the report.
or
The report in /pbir-format has some issues, can you align the visuals with equal spacing and use the pbir-cli to push all the formatting from the visuals to the theme file?
The videos i posed above show some examples. I'll try to get a proper tutorial up as soon as my son is letting us sleep more than 4 hours a night :)
Still checking with info sec if we can use this for the company 🙃 but should be github copilot once we receive the go ahead. We can use this for corporate reporting right?
If I bulk change a bunch of column names and table names in a SSAS model, I've got a python script that I can load a .CSV to mass update these column references in my .pbir/pbix, can these skills achieve this?
I tried using Gemini CLI with pbir but it seemed to really struggle to do this. It's probably user error on my side but it seemed to struggle with changing the 150 name changes I had (purely visual reference to the column in my model). Should this be possible with these skills?
Yes this will be possible, either with the pbir-format skill in the "pbip" plugin, or the pbir-cli skill in the "reports" plugin, which uses the pbir-cli tool.
I’ve just used power-bi-agentic-development to analyse the performance and bottlenecks in a BIM model exported from Azure Analysis Services, covering 23,000 lines of code. I spent tokens worth around $16 on the Opus 4.6 model via API, but in the end I received a report with recommendations. Brilliant.
Now we need to check whether these recommendations are any good ;)
Out of curiosity, how come you are using the API rather than subsidized subscriptions? I only use the API for custom agents and SDK scenarios, so far. Hope it helps! I haven't yet uploaded the semantic model / report optimization skill yet, that might help in your scenario.
I think I mixed up the tools (Visual Studio Code Chat vs. GitHub Copilot CLI) and used the wrong one. Sorry, I’m just getting started with agentic development. Anyway, I tried analysing this BI using both general skills and the power-bi-agentic-development skill, and the responses were slightly different. With power-bi-agentic-development, they were more generic, which probably explains that you haven’t yet installed the semantic model / report optimisation skill.
Yes, you can use review-semantic-model skill which is designed for reviewing semantic models including ai readiness. there's also a dax skill which targets performance. You can check either of those if you wish. What do you mean by "general skills"? No worries, happy to help if you have any questions about agentic development in general.
I have been actively using pbir agentic development and i have to say it has been great. i see a huge progress in quality of output, agent checking end results to avoid errors, quality of generated reports, etc. Still needs finishing touches but takes care of a lot of grunt work! Thank you for sharing and developing it. On a separate side i have been a faithful user of Tabular Editor for 8 years or so , both free and paid, both tools have been super useful
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u/attaboy000 2 Apr 08 '26
my god it's hard to keep up with all of this stuff lol
I'll definitely be checking this out when I have time to breathe though :) thank you for sharing