Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Joshua Birk, Senior Director of Admin Evangelism at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about how Agentforce Vibes can help admins debug code, create documentation, and so much more.
You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Joshua Birk.
Josh has been getting a vibe lately, and it’s not just him. More and more programmers have been adapting their workflows to incorporate AI and give themselves a helping hand. Vibe coding is here to stay, and it’s coming to Salesforce with the release of Agentforce Vibes.
Pair programming, also known as someone looking over your shoulder while you code, is a classic way to get unstuck. Whether you’re missing a semicolon or calling the wrong function, having another set of eyes on your code can make all the difference.
Vibe coding is the same concept, but you’re using AI for that external perspective. With an AI assistant, admins can quickly troubleshoot a wall of code to spot errors or comb through pages of documentation for a key piece of information. And now, that functionality has been built into Salesforce development environments with Agentforce Vibes.
If you’re already a user of VS Code or Code Builder, you already have access to Agentforce Vibes. If you’re running a trial org or developer edition, you may need to download and install the extension.
Like any AI tool, the things you can do with Agentforce Vibes are too many to list. Josh gives the example of product requirements documentation (PRD). PRDs are the encyclopedia of everything going on with a project: requirements, challenges, blockers, key metrics, etc. It’s an essential document for any project, but it’s difficult to create and dense to parse.
Agentforce Vibes can help you with PRDs on both fronts. You can spin up a PRD for a project and get a running start, or go through an existing PRD for whatever information you need. In short, it helps you do more, faster.
“There’s always a question of what skills are admins not going to need in the future of AI,” Josh says. “I don’t know if that’s the right question, because I think it’s all about your skills leveraging AI—not AI taking over your skill set.”
Agentforce Vibes isn’t going to replace a development team, but it can give admins a starting point to collaborate more effectively with them. If you have coding skills, it can help you debug and document. If you’ve built a ton of flows and are worried some might be redundant, it can help you find those.
AI tools like Vibes won’t replace admin skills—they’ll amplify them. Like a calculator in math class, Vibes helps you move faster but still requires foundational knowledge. The key is knowing what to ask, validating results, and using AI as a supportive peer, not a replacement.
Make sure to listen to the full episode for more details about Agentforce Vibes from Josh, and don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us every Thursday. Until next time!
Mike:
This week on the Salesforce Admins podcast, we’re joined by Josh Birk, senior director admin evangelism, and really just all around great explainer of complicated things. Coming off of Dreamforce, there’s a lot of people talking about vibe coding, what it is, where it came from, and why it matters for Salesforce admins. So we’re going to dive into that, along with Agentforce Vibes and how it can change the way that Salesforce admins approach requirements, automation, and even documentation. So you want to give this one a listen to and share it with a few Salesforce admins who maybe are curious about coding in the age of AI. So with that, let’s get Josh on the podcast.
So Josh, welcome back to the podcast.
Josh Birk:
Thanks, Mike. Good to be here.
Mike:
We have so much to talk about. We’re coming off of Dreamforce this year. I feel like we’re heading into one of the busiest Decembers as a Salesforce admin I can remember, because we’re still releasing, upgrading products in this age of AI. But one thing that left Dreamforce that I wanted to talk to you about is I heard a lot about vibe coding.
Josh Birk:
Yeah.
Mike:
And so I want to start there, before we talk about the Salesforce product, and just kind of level set. Because you’re a developer, you’ve built code.
Josh Birk:
I have. I have.
Mike:
I haven’t. I’ve shown you how to add a icon to an application.
Josh Birk:
Famously so, yes.
Mike:
That was my one win in my life. I’ll take that. But this whole idea of vibe coding seems to be taking over tech. Let’s talk about that.
Josh Birk:
Yeah, it is definitely taking over tech. And if you want to think about how blindly fast we’re going right now, I think I first heard the term vibe coding somewhere during this summer.
Mike:
Oh.
Josh Birk:
This time last year, not even a speckle on somebody’s eye. And now it’s really all the rage. So it’s moving. Yeah. Yeah. And the first time I heard it too, my first response was of course, “Well, what are you talking about? What is vibe code?”
Mike:
To be fair, it sounds awesome. Because I totally love tie-dye shirts, I love the 1970s, and I’m sitting around thinking like, “Yeah brother. I am going to get myself a tie-dye t-shirt and we’re going to vibe.”
Josh Birk:
Yeah. Actually, my first response was closer in that vein. I actually thought they meant flow development. Like not flows as in admin development, but when you get into your flow zone kind of thing.
Mike:
Oh yeah. Yeah.
Josh Birk:
I thought, “Oh, is there some cool new way to get into my vibe?”
Mike:
Hey, it’s like that social media movie. That’s what my friends always call it.
Josh Birk:
Yeah.
Mike:
We’re like, “You can’t interrupt him. He’s plugged in.”
Josh Birk:
Exactly.
Mike:
He’s plugged in.
Josh Birk:
It is. And this is a good note for working with your developers. If they have their headphones on, they are probably not willing to talk to you. Just as a reminder out there for feeding and nurturing your developers. So yeah, no. So vibe coding is, as kind of an old school developer, there’s a really interesting paradigm to describe it, which is peer programming. And peer programming was this thing that was kind of… I don’t want to say it was kind of a fad, but the idea was get a fellow programmer to basically look over your shoulder and assist you while you’re coding kind of thing.
Mike:
Okay.
Josh Birk:
And back at one of my earlier jobs, we used to do it usually when we were like we’re stuck, right? And it’s like we get stuck in something, “Hey Craig, can you come over and peer program with me for a little bit?” And there’s this kind of myth in coding that sometimes all you literally need is another pair of eyeballs staring at your screen and your code will magically work better. But it was more of an idea of like, “Oh, you missed that semicolon.” Catching little things along the way. Vibe coding, similar concept except you’re using an AI assistant. The conversation you’re having is with an AI who can sit there and create things for you, read files for you, analyze things for you. And so you just sort of have at your fingertips this assistant that’s going to help you do tasks faster and easier.
Mike:
Okay. So yeah. I also totally you get that like when you’re proofreading stuff. I’ll be going through whatever and I’ll be like, “I can’t not find this word anymore because I’ve been looking at it forever.”
Josh Birk:
Right, right. And old school English major, never turn in your paper until somebody else has read it, right?
Mike:
Uh-huh.
Josh Birk:
Always get another pair of eyeballs because you’re too close to your source material to know what you said that sounds wrong to somebody like that. And yeah, vibes can be like that too. It can be your other pair of eyes.
Mike:
So Salesforce has Agentforce Vibes.
Josh Birk:
Yes.
Mike:
And we saw it at Dreamforce and the developer keynote, and you’ve had a chance to get hands-on with it.
Josh Birk:
Yeah.
Mike:
Let’s talk about what Agentforce Vibe means for admin.
Josh Birk:
So let’s talk software. Let’s talk about, specifically when we say Agentforce Vibes, what we’re talking about. And what we’re talking about is an extension into Visual Studio Code. Now Visual Studio Code is the basis of Code Builder, also by the way now renamed Agentforce Vibes IDE for those who haven’t seen that change yet. And that’s Visual Studio Code in a browser. And the cool thing about Agentforce Vibes IDE is that it’s not like a HTML representation of a development environment. It’s actually running… You know when you can’t log into your computer and somebody from IT logs in for you and they’re like, “I’m going to take over your mouse and do a whole bunch of stuff.”
Mike:
Mm-hmm.
Josh Birk:
It’s like that technology, but you get to use Visual Studio Code remotely, basically. So the extension comes pre-installed, and so the nice thing about it all being in your browser is that you don’t have to install anything. You just basically go to a click, pull up a window and let it start doing all of its things to initialize, and then you’re pretty much good to go. And it’s even had, I don’t know when this improvement happened, but it used to be you had to go through this kind of awkward logging into your own org kind of thing. And that actually has been skipped, so it actually knows your org itself.
Mike:
Oh.
Josh Birk:
And then what you’re going to see in the IDE is a pane off to the left side, and it’s a client… And now we got to get a little nerdy here. That client logs into the Salesforce MCP server. And I don’t know when the last time we’ve had a chance to use the term MCP, but that’s model context protocol, which basically is a protocol that says, “This is how an AI client can perform actions on a Salesforce server.” And so Vibes sits within VS Code and it knows kind of your org shape, and then it can go through the MCP server and be like, “Hey, can you download all the metadata for my custom objects?” And things like that. Now if you’re an instance that’s like a trial org or a developer edition, you may have to actually download Visual Studio Code and then install the Salesforce extension, which will include the CLI and Vibes and a whole bunch of other stuff. Nice thing is that’s very simple to do. And also because of the way Agentforce Vibes ID works, it’s feature parity, right? You’re basically doing the same thing, you’re just doing it locally on your desktop as opposed to in the cloud.
Mike:
So it’s meant to help you build faster?
Josh Birk:
That is one of the things it can help you do. Yeah.
Mike:
Okay.
Josh Birk:
So let’s see. A few of my favorite use cases.
Mike:
Yes.
Josh Birk:
Because this is one of the big problems with AI in general, right? Because I tell people and somebody talks, I’m like, “Look, if you haven’t played with any of these, just go talk to them.” Because part of it is like how a conversational UI works doesn’t really click for people, I think, until they actually start using it. And then I’m like, “Ask it to tell you a dad joke. Ask it to play 20 questions. Stuff like that.” Don’t ask Vibes to do a dad joke. You can, I think it probably will respond.
But one of the first examples I tried to do was I’m creating out this demo for a fictional company, and so I gave it basically the overview of what the company does. And then I asked it, “What kind of custom data would you recommend?” Sort of thing. It’s like, “Oh, okay.” And so it can recommend that, it can create those custom objects for you, it can create those custom fields for you. And then you can also take that to another step and be like, “Okay. Based on what you know about this fictional company, what you know about the data structure, what flows would you recommend? What kind of automation would you recommend?” And so it’s kind of like having not just a developer in your back pocket, it’s kind of like having an architect in your back pocket too. So you can kind of help solve some of these puzzle pieces without necessarily having to sit down and have a meeting with an entire development team in order to keep moving forward.
Mike:
So I saw in some of our presentations, like at Dreamforce and both at New York World Tour, they would talk about a product requirements document.
Josh Birk:
Okay.
Mike:
I’m going to go out on a limb and say… It’s a pretty sturdy limb because it’s holding me. There’s probably admins that are inept and it’s like second nature to kind of document requirements, especially heading into a big build.
Josh Birk:
Yeah, yeah.
Mike:
And then there isn’t. And I would say I fell into the, “There isn’t.” I always tended to document everything after the fact.
Josh Birk:
Yeah.
Mike:
But if you’ve never done like a product requirements doc, which I think helps Agentforce Vibes, just helps in vibe coding, but it to me feels like also a best practice. What should a PRD include, and how should that motion kind of get started for admins?
Josh Birk:
Yeah. So we were talking earlier, and so I kind of brushed up on what a PRD kind of looks like. And back in my consultancy days, I kind of wish this was more of a trend. Because we didn’t have a requirements doc, we had requirement docs.
Mike:
Oh.
Josh Birk:
So the designer would come up with layouts, the development team would come out with X, and the business requirements team would come out with Y. And a PRD really tries to consolidate as much of that into one document. So it’s kind of a, “Here is the encyclopedia of everything that’s going on with your current project.” And so that’s requirements, it’s challenges, it’s blockers, key metrics. So it’s kind of a one-stop guide into like, “Where are we in the success of this project?”
Mike:
Mm-hmm.
Josh Birk:
And I think one of the cool things about a client like Vibes is when you look at something like that, it can be overwhelming, right? It can be a lot. But to Vibes, it’s just a big block of text, right? It’s not going to get overwhelmed over something like that. And so with a good PRD, Vibes knows where you’re trying to go. And so to kind of go back to the example of like, “How should we build out this application?” You’re giving it all of the touchpoints that it really needs. And you can also use Vibes to be like, “Hey, can you recommend changes to my PRD?” Kind of thing. So because when I’m looking at this document format, I’m like, “Wow, that is a lot of information we’re tracking in one place. Wouldn’t it be nice if I had another pair of eyeballs in order to work with this?” And so I think that’s where Vibes is kind of a nice little assistant that can sit there next to you and help craft, navigate and organize a document like that.
Mike:
Yeah. I always try to think of how do you take this from admins who are working with many teams and it’s a huge app, to like some of the times… Like I was an admin with a couple hundred users, I would get four or five people together. I didn’t have anybody that was a UX or interface designer. I just kind of had to figure it out on my own.
Josh Birk:
Yeah, yeah.
Mike:
I think that’s part of where Vibes can also help you, right?
Josh Birk:
It can. And it’s kind of one of those things. Like right now I haven’t had a lot of great success with Vibes creating like a complicated flow or anything like that, but this is where it’s definitely going in the future. And so a use case that I think they actually demoed at the developer keynote Dreamforce was your designer gives you a Figma, you give that Figma to Vibes, and Vibes gives you a lightning web component. I don’t think Vibes can do this yet, but I’ve done that kind of thing with AI just with like an image. Somebody says like, “Oh, this is what I want the component to look like.” And I go, “Snap. Claude, hey, create this lightning web component for me.” So what that does… And it kind of chills me a little bit, because one of the first talks I ever did about AI was at Forcelandia, and it was all about the convergence of roles, and it was all about how an admin can now have starting points. They’re not going to replace a development team, but going back to a PRD, it can help them create the docs that the developers need in order to get their job done.
Mike:
Mm-hmm.
Josh Birk:
And some of those docs might even include, “Here’s a block of code.” And the admin doesn’t necessarily need to know exactly how that code works, but something like Vibes can be like, “Oh, this is part of the PRD that we’re going to give those developers so that they have that information moving forward.” And so if you start kind of thinking about it in terms of documents in, documents out with Vibes in the center, it gives an admin a lot more interconnectivity when it comes to being able to quickly move through those tasks. Still not replacing the human in the loop, right?
Mike:
Right.
Josh Birk:
Where nobody’s going to say like, “Hey admin, could you just write that apex trigger for me and get that into production as quickly as possible? That’d be great. Thanks.” None of those models have changed. Those rules still apply. But we can move into another example. Let’s say an admin wakes up, they get a Slack message that’s like, “Hey, this flow isn’t working correctly.” They can pull up Vibes and run tests against that flow and ask vibes like, “Hey, I’m getting this error. Can you help me figure out what’s going on in flow with that?”
Mike:
Very good. I was going to ask, because you said helps start or helps create the foundation.
Josh Birk:
Yeah.
Mike:
And I think that’s always the thing that we’re looking at is, “Oh, so I can just give Vibes this requirements doc and go to lunch, come back, and it’s done.”
Josh Birk:
Kind of where we’re moving at the very least. And when I say moving, once again, we’re talking in terms of AI, so we’re talking months, not years. Right?
Mike:
Yeah.
Josh Birk:
Again, Vibes didn’t exist six months ago. In six months, it’s going to be a lot more powerful and a lot more capable. And I think that’s one of the visions Salesforce has for it is it’s your business analyst’s buddy, it is your requirements gathering buddy, but it’s also your application building buddy. And once again, creating that minimal viable product that you can just get into a sandbox, and then have people get feedback based on that. Time to delivery on that stuff is going to just start to evaporate, it’s going to be so fast. And once again, we’re still going to need the expertise. AI is going to get stuff wrong, it’s going to go into corners it’s going to need to be pulled out of. And so I don’t see… There’s always a question of like, “Well, what skill is an admin not going to need in the future of AI?” And I don’t know if that’s the right question, because I think it’s all about your skills leveraging AI, not AI taking over your skillset.
Mike:
And also, I mean you mentioned it, I’m thinking of back to how you started the conversation which is like the peer programming. You would always double check. They’re double checking your work and you’re double checking their work.
Josh Birk:
Mm-hmm.
Mike:
And so I would think at times you could probably get a little over your skis with Vibes if it could create things that you’re like, “Oh wow, I’m so glad it created that. I didn’t know how.” Now the impetus, in my opinion, is still on you to go back and learn. I use the metaphor of the first time you got to use a calculator in math class.
Josh Birk:
Right.
Mike:
You’re like, “Oh my God, I can get the answer so much faster.”
Josh Birk:
Exactly.
Mike:
But the math teacher’s like, “Right, but you should have already knew the answer. The calculator should have just reinforced it.”
Josh Birk:
Right, right.
Mike:
And I think with Vibes, you should already know what you’re going for.
Josh Birk:
Mm-hmm.
Mike:
This just kind of… I don’t know. Maybe it’s like a microwave meal. It just makes the time from like when you’re hungry to when you get to eat the Salisbury steak down to one to two minutes.
Josh Birk:
Right, right, right. Yeah, because we’re of that age when microwaves were magic.
Mike:
They still are Josh.
Josh Birk:
They still got a heart.
Mike:
They’re still magic.
Josh Birk:
I still barely understand how they work.
Mike:
They make popcorn and they warm up soup.
Josh Birk:
They’re just your friend. Yeah, no. And in AI circles, the calculator analogy rings pretty hard, pretty true. Because we’re also of that age when it was the fear of the calculator. Every kid’s going to stop learning how to do math because they won’t have to learn math anymore. And I point to there are calculators I don’t know how to use, and the reason I don’t know how to use them is because my math isn’t strong enough. There’s buttons and stuff on there that I might as well go back and play Pac-Man. I just can’t use this thing. And it’s the same kind of thing. If you’re not skilled up enough, you’re not going to be able to leverage AI to get your stuff done faster. It’s definitely a loop where the smarter the human is, the smarter the AI is going to be.
Mike:
So let’s talk about, because I try to cover all the bases and it’s impossible, but admins that work with developers and admins that want to use Vibes. If you and I were building something and I’m your admin, which first of all, lucky you. I meant that sarcastically.
Josh Birk:
I know. I would be honored if you were my admin.
Mike:
Because that could sound awfully, awfully boastful. What would you expect me to do in Vibes that maybe you wouldn’t do? I don’t know if that makes sense. But if we’re working together on a project and I’m like, “I’m going to use vibes for X, Y, and Z.” As a developer, what are you like, “Cool. I feel good you doing that, because I’m going to do A, B, and C.”
Josh Birk:
And I think this is an interesting dynamic in Salesforce development and app building in general. What I would want from an admin or a business analyst is okay, you have your PRD, right? You have your North Star, you know where you’re trying to go. And as a developer, can you help… We need to have a conversation to identify the technical gaps that are outside limitations, or for other architectural reasons we need code in order to accomplish that. And what I think is interesting is some of that reduces every year. Because for instance, take dynamic page layouts, right?
Mike:
Mm-hmm.
Josh Birk:
And when I first saw us as a sort of admin and developer’s clothing, or developer and admin’s clothing, I’m not sure the right analogy there, when I first saw that feature I’m like, “Why is everybody so excited about this?” Because I’m like, “It’s an if-then statement basically.” But then I saw working in layouts with logic to it and I’m like, “Oh, that used to be a lightning web component.” You used to have to have a lightning web component to do that.
And it’s kind of like when we rolled out Process Builder and it’s like, “Well, you used to have to have an apex trigger for that.” And those corners are slowly kind of getting moved around. But that’s where I think Admin Vibes, PRD or Business Docs or whatever, when you look at that you’re like, “I can’t cover that. I need to highlight this and get it to my dev team.”
Now my favorite party trick from Vibes is one of the things you can tell Vibes is to create a file in a specific format. And so if you use Slack and you’re communicating with the team in a Slack channel, you can take these documents and you can ask Vibe, “Hey Vibes, can I have that as a markdown file?” And then you can pull that markdown file, copy and paste it, put it into a Slack canvas and at mention your developer and Bob’s your uncle.
Mike:
That’s nice.
Josh Birk:
What’s nice about it is it’s very clean. And the question is, are you communicating within Vibes? Well, probably not. If you’ve got a Slack channel, that’s probably where your team is actually organizing things. But Vibes can be the pipeline into that. Which, we should also mention, something I haven’t had a lot of chance to play with… But the other advantage of Vibes, because it is an MCP client, it is not stuck with just talking to the Salesforce MCP server. So if you work with Jira, you work with Slack, you work with Atlassian, you work with these other third party integrations, you can also use Vibes to work with those integrations too. So from a development team point of view, for instance, that means they can do things like interact with GitHub. And so they’re not just working within Vibes, but they could be checking in code, they could be pulling down pull requests and they could be deploying it to a sandbox, all with staying within the same environment. Now what that means for admins is something I think we need to kind of poke around a little bit and see what are those third party things. Like what are the other things that’s sitting at a Vibes terminal would be making your job faster?
Mike:
Yeah. Well, that was actually going to be my next question is what’s… You go back and look at the transcript of this. I think what’s interesting, we’ve said Vibes the whole time, but I think in the technology ecosphere that we live in it’s actually vibe coding.
Josh Birk:
Yeah.
Mike:
And coding feels very loaded. It’s a developer term.
Josh Birk:
It is.
Mike:
We’re saying Vibes because it feels very I want to say end user-friendly, a little bit more so than trying to look at code. But if you’re thinking, “Okay, this is something I need to pay attention to as a Salesforce admin”, but you’re like me and coding just doesn’t make sense to you, what are some of the skills that they should lean into to kind of prepare for? I’m going to guess that this is kind of the new way of building applications.
Josh Birk:
It’s moving into that. And I kind of want to hang a lantern there, because it’s like first of all I completely agree. And it’s just kind of one of those… We’re definitely stuck with the term vibe coding. It’s not going anywhere.
Mike:
It’s like social media.
Josh Birk:
It’s like social media. Well also, I have to say, vibe coding for a change doesn’t sound like some random engineer named it. So it’s got kind of good marketing behind it. But the coding aspect is definitely like that, that’s a loaded phrase. And I know I’ve talked to admins who really do react to that kind of thing that just sort of like, “Well, a developer edition’s not for me because I’m not a developer.” And I’m like, “That’s cool. I understand you think that. The developer edition is absolutely for you if what you need is a working version of Salesforce where you’re kicking the tires of things like Data Cloud, Agentforce Studio and Vibes.”
So I think we’re going to have to start… So for instance, one of the things I want to highlight in this coming year is like the new tools that we have for flow testing.
Mike:
Oh?
Josh Birk:
And when I started, I hadn’t had a chance to really catch up to it. Our wonderful Jennifer Lee had a demo video for the Admin Meadow and I was reviewing that. And what occurred to me is that this is unit testing for flows. And so once again, we’re pulling in these developer terms, right? Unit testing for flow. Now we have to jump into a rabbit hole. “Okay, well what’s unit testing?” And unit testing is also an extremely engineering centric term, right? “What do you mean by a unit?” Well, a unit is the one thing you’re testing, basically. It’s kind of [inaudible 00:26:12]. But the nice thing is, I think if we can get past the terminology, some of this does bring in… So why do you want to use these new flow testing tools? And trust me, I’m getting back to Vibes. But you want to use these new flow testing tools because when you debug your flow, that tells you if your flow is running without errors. What it doesn’t do is tell you is your flow running correctly and giving you the outcome that you want, right?
Mike:
Uh-huh. Because running without errors and running with the result that you want are two different things.
Josh Birk:
Two different things. Exactly. And the concept of unit testing for like apex, and the reason why Salesforce decided if you’re going to go to production you have to have 75% coverage. That means 75% of your code has a unit test related to it somehow. And the reason they wanted to do that, first of all, it kind of forces people to write better code. And second of all, in a complicated environment like ours, the classic example, right? Some developer threw a trigger on account on a Friday, and now nobody can use an account on a Monday because of the-
Mike:
And the servers melting.
Josh Birk:
And the servers melting down. Like law of unexpected consequences, right? Properly done, unit testing will keep that from happening because if you run your whole unit test suite before you deploy, and your unit tests are written correctly, then you’ll get that [inaudible 00:27:43] checkbox before you’re like, “Oh, something broke. I should go fix that before I deploy.” And we can assert that same paradigm with flows, which is a good thing since flows occupy the same kind of automation spaces like triggers. So where does this come back to vibe coding? Well, it comes back to I think admins need to kind of start adapting to some of the skills that developers are doing. Now the good thing is I’m not saying, “Go learn Java.” I am saying, “It’s time to have some of the soft skills that developers employ.” Like when’s the last time you sat down and did a code review of your flows? Like when’s the last time you did kind of an end to end, “Here’s our library of flows. And are all our flows working correctly?” And all of those questions are things that Vibes is very good at answering for you. So I think easing into some of this kind of new world of enterprise architecture and some of the new toys and the new tools that are coming out, Vibes is going to be a very good partner.
Mike:
I mean you just touched on a huge part that I think sometimes when we release new product we forget is we always focus on here’s how you can build new, faster, stronger.
Josh Birk:
Mm-hmm.
Mike:
But it’s also I remember when Flow and Process Builder came out, it was… But admins could clutter up an org with all of these flows.
Josh Birk:
Mm-hmm.
Mike:
That’s not a best practice that could be handled in one seamless apex trigger or something.
Josh Birk:
Right.
Mike:
And it’s like, right, but everybody builds to their skill.
Josh Birk:
Yeah, yeah.
Mike:
And it’s not necessarily wrong, it’s just you ask a hundred people and you’re going to get a hundred best practices of how to do it better. But I think what I’m getting at with this is, yes, you can build new, but boy, looking at what we look at as the core responsibilities for Salesforce admins, what about going back and just making it better?
Josh Birk:
Better, yeah.
Mike:
Because I do think you’re focused on building the new all the time.
Josh Birk:
Mm-hmm.
Mike:
I mean there’s a point at which you got to stop building the house and you got to clean the house.
Josh Birk:
Yes. Yes. As somebody who just actually had people over as dinner guests that weren’t like family since the pandemic, it’s an exercise I am very… Well, my wife did most of the work. But anyway, yes, every now and then you just have to get up and spray and clean everything.
Mike:
So your wife was like Agentforce Vibes?
Josh Birk:
She was kind of like Agentforce Vibes. Yeah. Which however was also giving me unit testing from time to time. But anyway.
Mike:
Yeah. That’ll be the next version of Agentforce Vibes. It will also request things from you.
Josh Birk:
Yeah. Yeah.
Mike:
So instead of you asking it for a joke it’ll be, “Before I build this unit, you have to tell me a dad joke.”
Josh Birk:
Tell me a good dad joke. I will write your…
Mike:
Uh-huh.
Josh Birk:
Uh-huh. I think I need to clarify something too. It’s like, why am I going back to flows and all this kind of stuff? And it’s like, even as somebody who has lived in a world of XML, when I look at a flow metadata XML my eyes just bleed. That is some dense, heavily formatted, heavily nested, and sometimes you’re just trying to find that one reference to a custom object or something like that. For a human to read that, it’s very unfriendly. For Vibes, walk in the park. It knows exactly how to understand that structure. And so that’s when we’re saying things like, “Hey, could you look at these 10 flows and tell me if any of them are redundant?” That’s why it’s good at that, is because it can really analyze that XML very quickly.
Mike:
Hmm, I like that. I want to end on a fun question.
Josh Birk:
Okay.
Mike:
For the three people that are still listening.
Josh Birk:
That haven’t fled for fear of unit testing. Yeah, I hear you.
Mike:
So of course I had AI help me with some of the questions for this. And the one was, “If vibe coding were a band member, what instrument would it play in the process and why?”
Josh Birk:
Oh, that’s a good question. That’s a good question.
Mike:
And you can’t say cowbell.
Josh Birk:
I wasn’t going to, but now I really want to.
Mike:
More cowbell.
Josh Birk:
So my first response, my first initial instinct was drums, because they kind of keep the beat kind of thing.
Mike:
Uh-huh.
Josh Birk:
But in the spirit of going back to where we kind of started like, “What do you think of when you think of vibes?” I think bass guitar.
Mike:
Oh yeah.
Josh Birk:
I think that deep kind of keeping you in the flow sort of thing, and every now and taking over when the lead guitarist is done with his solo kind of thing. But not having to be loud and flashy like the lead singer. Yeah, I’m going to go bass guitar.
Mike:
Yet, yet.
Josh Birk:
Yet.
Mike:
Okay. I like that, yeah. Or not triangle. I went with cowbell and triangle.
Josh Birk:
Triangle. I actually played percussion in high school, so I’ve actually played a triangle.
Mike:
Oh, see? Fun fact, you didn’t know about Josh Birk until you listened to the 30 some minute mark.
Josh Birk:
Exactly.
Mike:
That’ll be a trivia question somewhere.
Josh Birk:
It is a difficult instrument to master, really.
Mike:
Yeah, sure. Well, that was the hardest thing to segment off of.
Josh Birk:
There you go.
Mike:
Josh, thanks for coming on the podcast and helping with Vibes. I think what’ll be fun in a year to go back to this podcast and be like, “Aw.” [inaudible 00:33:59].
Josh Birk:
They were so innocent. Look at those big eyes that they had at the time. Yeah.
Mike:
Right.
Josh Birk:
Yeah, exactly.
Mike:
If they only knew what was coming.
Josh Birk:
Yeah. I think that’s an excellent idea. And I have two predictions. Number one, we will do that and I will sound so wonderfully naive about the capabilities of vibe coding actually went so far beyond what I’m even describing here. Or two, we’re going to be talking about some other thing that’s whatever vibe coding occurs in the summer, right? The whole new development fad.
Mike:
But vibe coding, I mean I know we’re talking about Agentforce Vibes, but vibe coding in the development world really feels like it’s not going anywhere for a while.
Josh Birk:
I don’t think it’s going anywhere.
Mike:
Not with all of the AI tools people have available.
Josh Birk:
To loop it back to a callback, it would be like throwing out your microwave. Like why? Why don’t you want your sandwich repeated up faster?
Mike:
Right. Hmm. I guess we’ll find out.
Josh Birk:
Guess we’ll find out.
Mike:
All right, Josh. Thanks for coming on the pod.
Josh Birk:
All right. Thanks for having me, man. It’s always a good time.
Mike:
And a big thanks to Josh for joining us and shedding light on vibe coding, and Agentforce Vibes. I think it’s exciting to see how AI is helping admins and developers, and really everybody in the tech ecosystem just build smarter, faster, and with more confidence. If this sparked some ideas or gave you some new tools to explore, please share it with a teammate or a fellow Salesforce admin. And until next time, we’ll see you in the cloud.
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