Nine skills that build a Power BI project
An open-source Agent Skills toolkit that goes from a plain-English request to a valid, branded PBIP.
Author and maintainer
The problem
Agent tooling for BI tends to stop at generating a SQL query or a picture of a chart. Neither is a deliverable. The actual unit of work in Power BI is a project (a semantic model, visuals, a theme), and nothing was generating one that would open without hand-repair.
What I did
- Authored all nine skills, the orchestration contract between them and the validation layer.
- Designed the two human confirmation gates that stop the pipeline running on a schema it guessed wrong.
- Built the source-agnostic introspection layer covering SQL databases, warehouses, files and APIs.
- Wrote the packaging and validation stage that guarantees the output opens in Power BI Desktop.
Architecture
- Each skill is a folder with a SKILL.md contract, so any agent runtime that reads Markdown manifests can use them, no framework lock-in.
- Responsibility is split by stage rather than bundled: an entry-point orchestrator, a data-source connector, a four-stage build pipeline, then theming and dashboard composition.
- The pipeline is semantic-mapper to TMDL, visual-selector to choose a chart from the data profile, visual-generator to emit PBIR files, and project-packager to scaffold, validate and zip.
- Two confirmation gates sit in the flow: one after the data model is inferred, one after the scaffold. The agent stops and asks rather than guessing at scale.
- Validation runs before packaging, because an invalid PBIP is worse than no PBIP: it fails silently at open time, far from the cause.
What went wrong first
Composability is a contract problem
Nine skills only compose if each one's output is the next one's declared input. Writing the contracts first, and treating data-model.json as the pivot, was what stopped this becoming one unmaintainable mega-skill.
Agents guess confidently when schemas are ambiguous
Source introspection cannot always infer relationships. Rather than let the agent invent them, the connector emits an explicit clarification list and the orchestrator gates on it.
Results
- composable skills
- 9composable skills
- pipeline stages, independently testable
- 4pipeline stages, independently testable
- licensed and public
- MITlicensed and public
It closes the last mile that most natural-language BI tooling leaves open: not a chart image, but a project a BI developer can open, review and take ownership of.