Last time, I came clean about being a lapsed developer — three decades removed from anything resembling production code — and admitted that AI had quietly turned me into a born-again vibe coder. I waved two shiny demos at you (a weather forecast widget and a real-time UK address lookup) and promised I’d come back and explain how I actually built them.
So here we are. Let’s get into the plumbing.
A quick recap
The premise of the last article was simple: DX Components are the right way to extend Constellation when out-of-the-box controls don’t cut it, but writing them has historically required React skills, an understanding of the PCore and PConnect APIs, and the patience to wrangle a full front-end build environment. For someone like me, that’s a lot of friction. AI tooling, it turns out, removes most of it — not all, but enough that the gap between “I have an idea” and “I have a working component” shrinks from weeks to an afternoon.
This time, I want to show you the setup I use, because the magic isn’t just “ask Copilot nicely.” It’s the combination of the right environment, the right context, and the right prompts.
Prerequisites & setup
You don’t need much, but you do need the right things in the right order:
Node.js (currently node 24 - but check the release notes for what matches your Pega version)
VS Code with the recommended extensions
Git (properly installed, not just downloaded — DX Component Builder will throw a tantrum otherwise)
GitHub Copilot enabled in VS Code, with agent mode available
A Pega environment you can publish to - the latest available version, ideally
Get those in place before you start prompting anything, or Copilot will cheerfully hallucinate its way around the missing pieces.
Letting Copilot set up the environment
Setting up DX Component Builder was always a the first hurdle, so this is where we can start to get real value from AI - just let Copilot to all the work. Here’s the prompt I use when I’m starting fresh in a clean VS Code workspace; the trick is to give Copilot enough context that it knows what kind of environment to build, and then let it do the boring bits:
You are an expert front-end developer familiar with React and also a Pega Lead System Architect. You are setting up an environment from which to build Pega DX Components. Your first task is to install a DX Component Builder development environment. The server name is “[insert server name here]”. Your second task is to pull the constellation-ui-gallery from github and examine all the example components in detail. Your research here will result in you creating a guide.md file which will detail all the information and best practices you need to subsequently create high-quality DX Components that are compliant with the Constellation design system.
Setting up guide.md is the single biggest quality multiplier I’ve found. Copilot’s output is only as good as the context you give it, and the constellation-ui-gallery repo ( GitHub - pegasystems/constellation-ui-gallery: This open-source repository provides a collection of ready-to-use and customizable Constellation DX components. Use this resource to gain inspiration, best practices, and a solid foundation for implementing custom components. · GitHub ) is essentially a free reference library of real, working, Pega-blessed DX Components. That guide.md becomes Copilot’s reference whenever I ask it to build something new. Suddenly its components look like real DX Components instead of generic React widgets that happen to mention Pega.
And away we go
Once you’re done with that, you are good to go. One final tip is that, just like if you are talking to a real developer, to get great results you need to have a conversation. One time I created a component that didn’t render in App Studio, giving an error when accessing the property panel. After a fruitless hour restarting servers and clearing caches, I eventually just told Copilot what was happening - it found and fixed the error, and redeployed the component in about 5 minutes.
And - component not quite what you want? Tell it what is wrong. Here is a real set of prompts from initial to final output:
Create a dx component that renders an integer property as a thermometer. The scale on the thermometer runs from 0 at the bottom to 100 at the top. The colour of the indicator will graduate from blue (0) to red (100). The component will take as input the value to indicate, and the maximum value possible. The maximum value will correlate to 100 on the thermometer and the indicated value will be scaled to between zero and 100. Negative values will be indicated as zero.
I want some changes to the component. Firstly the labels on the side should be percentages not values (i.e. 25%, 50% etc). Secondly, I want the colour of the indicator to smoothly graduate as it goes up the scale rather than the whole thing changing colour.
Change the labelling so the bottom is zero, the top is the maximum value, and the intermediates are just ticks with no numbering
Total time from first prompt to final component? About 30 minutes. This stuff is insanely powerful.
That’s the toolkit. Next time, I’ll take a real component from prompt to published and show what goes right, what goes wrong, and what I’ve learned not to ask for.
Until then - what would you build first?