Building with Agentforce and Flow: A Developer’s Hackathon Experience

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Melissa Hansen, Co-Founder and Principal Architect at HiFi Consulting Group, RAD Women Curriculum Lead, and Salesforce MVP.

Join us as we chat about her journey from fixing printers to developing an agent-powered scheduling tool in the TDX Agentforce Hackathon on Team MH4.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Melissa Hansen.

How Melissa started her career as a Salesforce Developer

Melissa started her career at a nonprofit, where she was the go-to person for troubleshooting tech issues. “You just become the person who’s best at fixing the printer, and then fixing the database, and then, before you know it, you’re a database administrator,” she says.

These days, Melissa is a developer, a consultant, and a Salesforce MVP for her work with RAD Women. She’s also a member of Team MH4, and I brought her on the pod to hear what building a conference scheduling agent in 16 hours was like from the dev side of things. 

Building an agent-powered scheduling tool at the TDX Agentforce Hackathon

Melissa is not someone who wants to be up until midnight coding, but she was so excited about the solution they were building that it was worth the sacrifice. Like most people on the team, it was her first time making something with Agentforce, and this was a great use case to learn more about it.

One of the biggest challenges for Melissa in going from building with code to grounding an agent is that the output is nondeterministic. In other words, if you run an automation, you expect to get the same results every time you give it the same data. Agents don’t work that way, they’ll give you something slightly different every time, and so you need to account for that in how you build and test your solution. 

To code or not to code, that is the question

We don’t always have a chance to talk to devs on the pod, so I wanted to hear what Melissa thinks about admin and developer collaboration. For her, the most important conversation to have is around automations.

Flow is a powerful tool for automations, but it’s not the only game in town. Melissa’s seen her share of scary flows for things that would be fairly straightforward in Apex. For her, the biggest determining factor is who will maintain the automation after it’s up and running. As no-code tools like Flow and Agentforce continue to improve, it’s especially important for admins and devs to help each other out.

There are so many more great insights from Melissa on where Agentforce is headed and how to work with developers, so be sure to listen to the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you can catch us every Thursday.

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Learn more

• Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: When Collaboration Meets Agentforce: The MH4 Hackathon Story

• Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: Transforming Conference Scheduling With Agentforce

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