Hi everyone!
Last week, we talked about vibe-coded extensions. If you remember, I said we'd hear that a lot… and I was right!
But this week, it's the dashboards' turn.
"Dashboards are dead", remember? Well, now they are back in force. With Claude Dashboards and Tableau Studio, you can now vibe-code your dashboard too! The layout, the containers, the formatting. You describe it, it appears.
Dashboards are back on the menu, for better and for worse.
Same cause, same problems
Just as it's hard for non-developers to vibe-code a good extension, it'll be hard for a non-designer to vibe-code a well-crafted dashboard.
No designer: each agent, each prompt gives a different layout, different fonts, different spacing. Ten authors, ten dashboard styles.
No governance: nobody decides what a good dashboard looks like in your company, so every new one invents its own rules.
No easy update: the brand color changes, or a filter must move on every page, and you're back to editing dashboards one by one, container by container. Yes, you can ask the agent to do it, but you need to ask in each dashboard (or at best, workbook).
Building a dashboard has never been faster. Keeping fifty of them consistent hasn't changed.
Am I being too harsh? Maybe. So I wanted to see it for myself.
I asked Tableau Studio to build one
This is our starting point; let’s see what Studio can do!
"Can you build a beautiful and modern dashboard using these 3 worksheets and filters?"
It works. Beautiful and modern? Not really. It added a grey background and a title, but that’s it. Bare minimum.
Round 2: with a mock-up
The Figma mockup
So I gave it a mock-up I made in Figma and asked it to follow it.
Better, but a few misses
Better.
The agent listed what it couldn't match: square corners instead of rounded ones (even though it can), a logo placeholder it wrote itself, and "I haven't seen it rendered, so please check it on screen".
Round 3: "I want rounded corners, more padding, and better sizing"
Rounded corners: done!
Am I pleased with the overall design? Not really.
The main issue seems to be that the agent can’t see what it generates. It should be able to export an image, look at it, and compare.
In any case, to get there, the agent rewrote the dashboard's XML with Python scripts on my computer, asking to run commands outside its own folder each time. I clicked "Yes, and don't ask again". Not sure your IT team would appreciate.
Meanwhile, in Figma
The same mock-up, exported to Tableau with our Figma-to-Tableau plugin. Same three worksheets, same data, one export, done.
To be fair: Studio is brand new; this was one try, and it will get better. But it shows the point. An agent can build a dashboard. It can't decide what your dashboards should look like.
Someone still has to design them.
What about Claude Dashboards?
Claude now builds dashboards too (in beta). You ask a question about your data, Claude writes the queries and gives you a working dashboard.
One-shot result of “Show me how my sales are evolving compared to last year”
Impressive.
That's great for mocking up what people want. Sit with a stakeholder, try five versions in ten minutes, and you know what to build before you even open Tableau.
The catch: your dashboards and their design now live in Claude. Your users, permissions, and governance live in Tableau. For many companies, moving dashboards to a new tool is a security question before it's a design one, and the answer is often no.
And it doesn't export to Tableau yet (it's on their list). So once the mock-up is approved, someone still has to build it for real, in Tableau.
Next week: how we want to fix it
We've been working hard on Figma-to-Tableau to bring our vision to life: your design in Figma, your data in Tableau, each where it belongs. Just a lot easier.
Here's a one-minute teaser:
Speak to you next week!
