Back in November 2024, I launched my first actual GitHub project. Coming from a low-code background, getting the Release Plans Visualized site published as a static Hugo site to host my embedded Power BI report was quite an exploration. I asked AI for questions on what and how to do, then clicked around and copy-pasted things. The result was not bad at all:

Now it’s 2026. The same content management gaps that were bothering me with Microsoft’s official release plans docs and website are still with us. There have been no visible changes in that infrastructure. Things have kept working — until the 2026 Release Wave 1 items were published and the Release Plans API broke down.

The releaseplans.net website I built earlier was basically just a Power BI report hosted in my M365 tenant. It had a daily data refresh that called an HTTP endpoint for a bunch of JSON data, then transformed that into visuals, and presented it to the whole world via the embed on the Hugo site. On March 19, the report refresh failed with “DataFormat.Error: We found an invalid escape sequence in the JSON input.” Someone had entered unescaped characters into one release plan item description and the updates stopped as a result.

After shouting about this on the public square of LinkedIn, the feed was actually fixed after a few days of downtime. Yay! In the age of AI coding agents, though, it only takes a few days to build an alternative solution. Since I didn’t feel like manipulating the old Power BI report to be more resilient against data format errors, I instead spent some tokens on building the next generation solution.

The feature that I ended up using on my own site the most was not the reporting and visuals. It was all about search. I wanted to find things and then see when those things had been updated. Everything else was secondary.

Now, I have the UI I always wanted. And you can have it, too: https://releaseplans.net/

It uses the same data as the old site. It all comes from the simple Release Plans API that someone at Microsoft was kind enough to build and launch in July 2023. Mentioned in the (last ever?) “Latest Improvements v1.1” deck for the Release Planner website, the API URL offers Dynamics 365 and Power Platform release data in a ready-to-consume format.

I happened to have a bunch of expiring Azure partner credits that I need to spend somehow, plus access to the Foundry API for Azure OpenAI services. Launching my Codex CLI and pointing it to a couple of repos plus some data and .md notes was how most of the new site was built. I intentionally chose the insanely heavy GPT 5.4 Pro model to test whether throwing extra capacity at a task like this would make a difference.

The outcome was pretty sweet. It also took literally ages for the big LLM to think about its moves. It’s not necessarily worth the time & money to use a Pro model in such a mundane task as building a React site on top of one JSON file. But as the AI evangelists on social media tell us, these days “you can just do things”.

I do appreciate how the teams at Microsoft are eating their own dogfood by hosting many current sites on Power Pages. The downside is that the UX isn’t exactly world class with this type of a tech stack. It’s great for easily exposing Dataverse records in customer portals behind a login. It’s not that great for most other types of websites.

Have you tried searching for things on the Release Planner website? Yup, it’s not a pleasant experience. After you get past the static advertisement block promoting an old release wave highlights video, you still have to figure out under which product page the matching results are found. One by one, you click inside the slow website and try to ignore all the visual clutter that stands in the way between you and the search results.

On my Release Plans Browser website, it’s all about filtering the data. There is zero bureaucracy about how the data should follow the MS org chart, let alone any marketers wanting to push their “content” in your face. The React site is literally just a fancy way to group, sort, arrange and prettify the JSON data. Even though it could still be optimized, I’m pretty damn proud about this first version already.

Yeah, of course it has a dark mode option! This is a website for low-code geeks, after all.

Clicking on a release item will open it in a side pane that shows all the information available from the API. Often this will be the same thing available on official Microsoft sites, but unfortunately screenshots and some other extra info, like links to feature docs, aren’t passed through to the JSON. To overcome this gap, I’ve added buttons for quickly searching the item name on both the Release Planner site as well as Microsoft Learn.

“Hey, wait a minute: that MS Learn button takes me to Bing?” Yes, it does. Because for all the great features that the Learn site has for consuming documentation, it sucks at search. Specifically in how you can target search to a specific set of articles. Or in the case of Release Plans: you can’t. Because those plans don’t exist as a search scope visible to regular users at least.

Why Microsoft is not capable of offering a “search all content in this plan” option, and instead allows only exact matches for page titles remains a mystery. Perhaps it’s due to how the Release Plans are not visible as GitHub repos under MicrosoftDocs account. If they were, we could of course do much more with the content, rather than just downloading gigantic PDF exports from Learn.

I realize my new version of releaseplans.net is a bit like the Modern UI release stunts that Microsoft product teams keep pulling. Even though the old interfaces may not have been the prettiest, often they contained functionality that power users find valuable. In the case of release plan data, the visuals in the Power BI version have not been replicated in the new React site (for now).

The good news is: you can have it all! I have preserved the report from the Release Plans Visualized site under the Analytics section of the new site. Just update your bookmarks to https://releaseplans.net/analytics if you prefer that one.

“Embedded report: Power BI analytics surface.” Yeah, I know... There’s still some unfortunate LLM smell left in this new site from all the work GPT 5.4 Pro did in generating its code. Don’t worry, I’ll clean it up to be more natural sounding once I get the chance.

The old repo is also a bit messed up from my earlier stalled vibe coding experiments and needs to be cleaned up. As for the new site, while technically it is running on GitHub Pages, I’m not yet sure if I want to make its repo public or not. For these AI-first projects where each prompt quickly turns into a PR, the clutter from all the commits makes me think the concepts of GitHub ought to be reimagined for this new age of coding agents.

Anyway, I honestly do appreciate all feedback and ideas on how to fix/improve the Release Plans Browser site. Go check it out and reach out to me either via email reply, through LinkedIn, or any other channels where you find me! I do these things for the community because it has given me so much. Now with these vibe coding techniques, I can give back more than just my written words and meme pics.

Just like with the XrmToolBox Plugin Catalog I built last year, these sites built on top of public data sources offer a safe way to experiment and learn about where AI rocks and where it sucks. If the learning process also creates outputs that have value to others, all the better.