Rayfin and the New Wild West of Power BI

Rayfin brings amazing customizability every Power BI developer craved for. And yet, for the foreseeable future, it will also be the "wild west".

Full web apps allow you to build almost any imaginable analytical experience. But there is a cost to that. Power BI was more or less a unified experience for using reports. Slicers, filters, drill-through, cross-highlighting, bookmarks, pages.

Even with all the hacks community developed over the years, the core mental model stayed mostly the same. You learn it once, and then you can use it across most reports. With Rayfin-style apps, not so much. Now every report can become its own web app. With different navigation. Different interactions. Different UX patterns. Different assumptions.

Which means users may have to learn how to use every new report almost from scratch. And governance will have a field day trying to keep it all somewhat consistent.

There is also a technical side to this. Previously, as Power BI developers, we mostly worried about the semantic layer:

• Bad Power Query ETL. • Rogue DAX measures. • Overcomplicated models. • Wrong relationships. • Query folding broken somewhere. • A visual that sends terrible queries.

Now you add one more layer to care about: React. And it is very easy to build badly performing React apps. A few cascading useEffects, uncontrolled re-renders, inefficient queries, and "vibe-coded" components stitched together without architecture - and your beautiful custom experience is burning CUs and user CPUs like crazy. AI will help you build faster. It does not automatically mean you are following good development practices.

And is Power BI going anywhere? Not in the short term. Power BI still has years of governance around it. Users have muscle memory. Admin teams know how to manage it. Companies already built entire operations around it. But in the era of AI, where everyone is pressured to increase efficiency, I do think there will be a strong push toward more efficient and more purpose-built analytical web apps.

That freedom also means you now own the mess.