SVG Card Addiction
Ever since AI and SVGs became a real option in Power BI, there's been this weird cloud hanging over using them. "It'll be harder for the next developer." "It's a maintenance nightmare." "Nobody knows what it's doing." I've heard it all.
But honestly, if your visual doesn't need cross-filtering or cross-highlighting (like most cards), I'm struggling to find a reason not to go the AI + SVG route.
It looks better. You have way more flexibility. You can just describe what you want in plain English like "put the label to the left of the value instead of locking me into top/bottom" and it just builds it. In about 30 seconds. Worst case you spend 5 minutes prompting it to clean up the output. That's the whole process.
The "harder to maintain" argument would hit different if the alternative wasn't spending an hour wrestling with a standard card visual trying to do something it was never built for.
And the "other devs won't know what it's doing" point is giving me high school math teacher energy. You know the type, the one who made you show all your work and wouldn't let you use a calculator because "you won't always have one in real life." Well, everyone has access to AI now. If another dev inherits your SVG and doesn't know what a line does, they can paste the whole thing into whatever model their org is paying for and just ask. Any halfway decent model can read it, explain it, and make changes to it without breaking a sweat. You don't need to hand-read every line of SVG code any more than you need to do long division by hand. And at this point almost every org has AI licenses for their people anyway, so if someone is choosing not to use it that's on them. You can't architect your whole workflow around people who are sticking their head in the sand and ignoring the world changing around them.
People also underestimate what stakeholders actually care about. They want the output to look good and communicate clearly. They're not losing sleep over how you built it.
The AI and Power BI integration is only going to get deeper from here and I'm not stressed about that at all. I'm genuinely excited. The quality of life improvement alone has changed how I approach building reports from the ground up.
/rant, but I'll happily die on this hill