Data apps best practices

Practical tips for getting higher-quality data apps with fewer iterations.

A few small habits make a big difference in the quality of the apps the agent produces. Use these as a starting point and adapt them to your team’s workflow.

Prompt iteratively

Most apps improve substantially after a few rounds of prompting. Rather than trying to describe the perfect app in one message, start simple and refine:

1. Send a short initial prompt that describes the core purpose of the app.
2. Preview the result and identify what’s wrong or missing.
3. Send focused follow-up prompts (e.g. “make the revenue chart a bar chart and group it by month”).
4. Repeat until the app does what you want.

Short, specific prompts tend to produce better changes than long, sweeping rewrites.

Use images to nail the style

Images help a lot to get the style right. The agent can pick up on layout, color, density, typography, and component style much more reliably from a picture than from a long written description.

Useful images to attach include:

• Screenshots of dashboards or apps you want yours to look like.
• Design mockups from Figma or similar tools.
• Sketches or whiteboard photos showing the layout.
• Examples of specific components (a card, a chart, a header) you want to mirror.

If you don’t like how something looks, attaching a reference image is often faster than describing the change in words.

Provide example data

Providing some data to the app—either as attached queries, dashboards, or sample values—helps the agent run much better queries. With concrete examples, the agent can:

• Pick the right metrics and dimensions from your semantic layer.
• Choose sensible default filters and date ranges.
• Generate visualizations that match the shape of your data.

When you provide data as context, the agent can see that data while it’s building your app. Don’t attach data the agent shouldn’t see. Once the app is built and running, all queries are still executed by Lightdash with the viewer’s permissions—but the building phase reads whatever context you attach.

Verify queries with the inspector

Before sharing an app with your team, open the query inspector and confirm that:

• Each query is using the metrics and dimensions you expect.
• Filters and parameters are being applied correctly.
• The numbers in the app match the numbers in your dashboards and explores.

Catching a wrong field or missing filter at this stage is much cheaper than discovering it after the app has been shared widely.

Keep apps focused

Apps tend to be easier to build, faster to load, and easier to maintain when they have a clear, narrow purpose. If you find yourself describing several unrelated workflows in one app, consider splitting it into multiple apps and sharing each in the space where it’s most relevant.