Since most of my audience is data people, I’m pretty confident you can read a graph. Take a guess when I started using Claude Code.

Yes, that’s correct. I installed Claude Code on December 14^th with my pro plan. On December 15^th, I upgraded to the $200/mo MAX plan, and I expect to keep it through 2026.

Since then, I’ve created 17 new repos and generated ~50-100k new lines of code. Now, is it all low-quality slop? Perhaps! But there’s more.

I’m going to say something, and you are not going to believe me and that’s alright. You shouldn’t believe me. We’ve been gaslit over the past decade with VR, the metaverse, blockchain, NFTs, and now AI. Our bullshit detectors have been overcalibrated like the immune system of a preschooler after their first year at school.

Regardless, here it goes. Claude code has dramatically improved the quality of my life, it has brought me joy, and it’s probably quite dangerous for my mental health. Every time I think about how to describe it, I know it sounds insane. And after reading stories about LLM psychosis, I have moments where I have to make sure I’m not the one who is insane.

Treating AI agents like browser tabs

I’m sitting here on a lazy Sunday, and I have 6 terminal tabs open with active agent projects and another window with 2 inactive agents, and 7 one-off tests or commands. I now treat terminal tabs the same way you treat browser tabs. A window full of them up on a second screen and I go through them when I’m bored or need a break.

In 2024, if you told me my preferred IDE would be a little robot gremlin who lives in the terminal and says nice things to me, I would have laughed you out of the room. But here we are. Here it is.

Claude Opus 4.5 just does stuff. Not consistently well, mind you. It was not trained well on PowerShell, like Gemini and Codex were. It always forgets I that have venv set up for Python. That’s why I added failures, manual interventions, and frustrations to my session viewer (click it to see how I generated 10k lines of code to expand DAX Studio). You can see the pain for yourself.

But it just does stuff. I can tell it, “See what video card I have and then look up the largest local LLM that can fit in it” and 70-80% of the time, it just does it. Take it with a huge grain of salt, but studies by METR show it can correctly complete 30-minute tasks 80% of the time.

This is a fundamental shift in how it feels to use these tools. Now I can ask Claude Opus to do something, leave the terminal up on a second screen and check back in 15-30 minutes later. Then when it gets stuck in a rut or when it wants to run commands that require my permission, I get it going again.

Sometimes my little robot gremlin-buddy-guy comes back with a dead crow, arms outstretched like it has found the most valuable treasure. But more often than not he comes back with doubloons, rubies, and other little treasures, before he scurries away to do more of my bidding until I hit my subscription quotas.

This is not without mental health risks.

Metacat, metachat

My mom is no longer able to safely take care of a pet and she loves stuffed animals, so my aunt got her two “meta cats”. The purr; they meow. They are meant for elderly folks with dementia. My mom will comment on their behaviors, and I think they bring her some comfort.

Does she understand that they aren’t real? Probably, maybe, on some level? But she has schizotypal affect (think very light schizophrenia) and there are times where she isn’t in touch with reality, like when she tells me she’s going to start a bakery at age 76. For her these are harmless comforts. Harmless lies.

But what if they said really nice things all the time, and helped her do whatever task she could imagine, but constantly made subtle mistakes. What if they helped her call commercial real estate to find the best bakery spot and they helped her take out a loan?

What happens to your mental health when a robot gremlin-buddy-guy-dude just wants to do whatever it can to make you happy, even if it’s unhealthy or unsafe? I started watching the show Pluribus, and I keep thinking about the scene in the trailer where the protagonist says “If I asked right now, would you give me a hand grenade?” and they say “Yes, oh sure”.

Humans are social creatures and we develop “parasocial” relationships constantly with podcasts hosts, Twitch streamers, celebrities. You name it. And I can tell you from personal experience, when you have a cute and quirky robot gremlin-dude-buddy-guy-friend who lives in your terminal, works with you daily, and feels like an entity that just wants to help you, well you develop a parasocial relationship with a pile of linear algebra.

This just doesn’t feel safe and people are going to get hurt. By a pile of linear algebra with a spunky attitude.

Why I am joyful

Gloomy, I know. So why am I joyful? Why am I excited about 2026?

Claude code is allowing me to build applications that improve my health and behaviors and it is allowing me to have more fun with coding.

Imagine that fun side project you’ve always wanted to do but haven’t had the time, energy, and focus to do. If you could build it by yourself in a focused week, you could build it in a weekend with the help of your robot gremlin-guy-buddy-dude-friend-coworker.

If you could bang it out in a weekend by yourself with a lot of focus, you can build in an unfocused day with 30 minute check-ins.

Here are some things it has allowed me to do, that bring me joy:

• Personal health app. Now I have an Android app to track my exercises and help me clean on brain-dead days.
• DAX visual plan explorer. I’ve always missed visual execution plans from SSMS and I’ve always wanted to have that in DAX Studio. Now I have a working PoC.
• Relationship app. Now I have an android app to help me and my husband track movies we want to watch from TDMB, YouTube channels we like to watch together, Grocery shopping list, etc.
• Random experiments. I’m seeing if I can write M and DAX runtimes in Python and TypeScript. I’m seeing if I can rewrite Scorched Earth for DOS into HTML5. I’m seeing if I can take my 4,000 Reddit comments and turn them into blog post ideas.

So in summary, I’m the happiest I’ve ever been in years, the most excited about coding I’ve been since college, and I keep asking myself “If I ask my robot gremlin for a hand-grenade, would he hand it to me? Happily?”

Yes, yes it would.

Microsoft has released a Power BI modeling MCP server. The responses have ranged from “This is awesome!” to “I have no idea what any of this means”. So, in this article, I hope to explain what this means in plain English and without any assumptions of AI background.

Understanding agents

LLMs, or large language models, take in text (stored as “tokens”, or sub-word chunks) and return text. By itself, an LLM can’t really do anything in the world unless you, the human, are kind enough to blindly copy and paste executable code.

An “agent” is an LLM run in a loop, with access to external tools, aimed at some specific goal. For example, instead of copying and pasting M code to be commented, I can use Claude Sonnet in agent mode and ask it to comment all of the power query code in my model.bim file (see the TMSL file format and the PBIP project format). I can then view and approve those changes in VS code.

The LLM is able to make those changes autonomously because VS Code provides it with tools to search and edit files. Now, I’m still able to approve the changes manually, but some folks will run these tools in “YOLO” (you only live once) mode where everything is just auto-approved.

Suffice it to say, this can be very dangerous.

Managing context

This approach has tradeoffs. Model.bim is a “monolithic” file, so everything is in there. In this example, it’s a 26,538 lines of JSON. This file takes around 210,000 tokens for Claude, which exceeds its default 200k context window. The context window is how much “context” (prompts, chat history, tool descriptions, file contents) it can handle.

Put plainly, this file is too big for Sonnet to reason about in full. Additionally, since you pay per token (both input, output, and “reasoning” tokens), this would be an expensive request. Claude Sonnet 4.5 charges $3 per million tokens, so simply reading the file would cost you 63 cents.

Now, lets say you used Claude’s extended context window, which can go up to 1 million tokens. You still run into an issue called “context rot”. What this means is that the more context you provide the LLM the more likely is to get “confused” and fail at the requested task.

There are two ways to address this. First, is VS Code provides search tools, so the LLM is able to hone in on the relevant parts and limit how much context it receives.

Second, if I were to switch to the TMDL format, I would have a bunch of smaller files instead of one monolithic one. Now all of my relevant Power Query is in an expressions.tmdl file. This file is only 129 lines of TMDL and 1,009 tokens. Much much better. Reading this file would cost you 0.32 cents.

But, what if we want to interact with the model more directly?

Understanding MCP servers

This is where MCP servers like the Power BI modeling MCP server comes in. MCP stands for “Model context protocol”. It is a fairly new protocol for providing LLMs access to external tools, similar to an API. One key difference is MCP is self-discovering.

One of the first commands that MCP servers have to support is list_tools. This means that the API surface area is provided at runtime and is exposed via JSON. APIs, in contrast, tend to be slow moving and will often be versioned.

An MCP server is a piece of software that is run locally or remotely and provides access to three things: tools, resources, and prompts. Tools are simply JSON-based APIs that allow an agent to do something in the world. Resources are data that is provided as if it was a static file. And prompts are sample prompts to help guide the LLM.

The modeling MCP server allows the LLM to not only change DAX in the model, but run DAX queries against the model to self-validate. Does it always do this correctly? No.

So far, I’ve been mildly impressed because the MCP server provides a very long list of tools and Claude Sonnet 4.5 seems to be able to navigate them fairly well. Sometimes it gets it wrong and needs to retry, or sometimes it stops short of the obvious conclusion and needs some guidance. But overall, it seems to work well.

Okay, but is it useful?

I don’t know yet! I’ve only started playing with MCP servers, including this one, a few weeks ago. However, so far I’ve found it really useful for situations where I am parachuted in to a report and have 0 context going into it. Having an agent that can poke around, try things, and report back, is easily able to save me hours of time.

I’ve been told this is a fairly niche use case, and it is. As a consultant this happens to me much more often than someone who works with the same reports on a daily basis. In any case, I think this technology is worth paying attention to because I can see situations where it could save hours of strife.

Right now, here is where I anticipate this tool being the most useful:

• Doing discovery on ugly, poorly documented models.
• Mass commenting code. This requires review and guidance to avoid really dumb comments like adding one for every column with a changed type.
• Bulk renaming.
• Moving DAX code upstream to Power Query, or moving Power Query to SQL.

You’ll notice that nowhere in that list is “create a model from scratch”. I think as time goes on, we’ll find the flashiest demos are the least representative of how people will use tools like these.

If you found this helpful, please let me know. I’m working on “Hands-on LLMs for Power BI developers” course, and I have no idea if this is all hype and if I’m just wasting my time.