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Exploring Agentforce Vibes Through Real-World Admin Use Cases
About this Episode
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Daryl Moon, Founder of CertifyCRM.com.
Join us as we chat about how curiosity and a test-first mindset can help you get the most out of Agentforce Vibes.
You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Daryl Moon.
Fishing and the art of AI maintenance
Daryl came into tech as a generalist who did a bit of everything: hardware, software, networking, whatever needed doing. One fateful day, however, he took on a contract to import some spreadsheets into a CRM and ended up as the de facto Salesforce Admin for his organization.
Just like everyone else, Daryl has spent the last year trying to get his head around AI and how to separate the smoke and mirrors from the actual potential value. A keen fisherman, his mind was blown one day when he used AI to summarize the fishing reports from his local bait and tackle shop and immediately went out and caught six fish.
How Daryl got started with Agentforce Vibes
On one of his trips to the local boat ramp, Daryl decided to throw on the ol' Salesforce Admins Podcast, where he happened to catch our episode about Agentforce Vibes with Josh Birk. He was already planning to work on a video about new Apex features in Spring '26, so he figured he'd give Agentforce a shot.
Daryl decided that the best way to learn about Agentforce Vibes was to try to build something simple that he was already familiar with. He spun up a developer org and asked the AI to build a Lightning Web Component for open opportunities, and while there were several things about it that didn't quite work as intended, he was impressed with how Agentforce Vibes would take things step by step using the plan and act modes.
What to build first with Agentforce Vibes
In order to learn more about building in Agentforce Vibes, Daryl decided to take it a step further. What would happen if he tried to build an entire application? He ended up getting most of what he asked for, though the AI got stuck on building a few automations. Most importantly, it got him 80% of the way there for 10% of the time investment.
Daryl's biggest piece of advice for any admin trying to learn Agentforce Vibes is to start by building something you already know. AI is a tool like any other, so work with something familiar so you can properly judge how well it's working.
Make sure to listen to the full episode for more from Daryl about how he learned Agentforce Vibes. And don't forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us every Thursday.
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Learn more
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Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: How Agentforce Vibes Speeds Up Admin Workflows
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Salesforce Admins Blog: Introduction to Agentforce Vibes for Salesforce Admins
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Full show transcript
Mike:
Welcome to the Salesforce Admins Podcast. This week I am joined by Daryl Moon, retired fishing enthusiast, but that's not what we're talking about. He is a longtime Salesforce pro who recently dove into Agentforce Vibes and he's going to bring us along for the ride. So from tinkering with lightning web components to building a full-on job seeker app, Darryl shares how his curiosity and a test first mindset helped him explore this new AI tool. And of course, we talk about some unexpected challenges of token limits, but that's going to happen when you're learning something. So if you've ever wondered whether Agentforce Vibes is worth your time, this episode is for you. And with that, let's get Daryl on the podcast.
So, Daryl, welcome to the podcast.
Daryl Moon:
Thanks, Mike.
Mike:
I'm very excited to have you on, especially after you posted on LinkedIn that you decided to jump in feet first into vibe coding, so I definitely want to talk about that. But before we get to that, I'd love to learn a little bit more about Daryl Moon. So, Daryl, tell us, how did you get started with Salesforce and what got you into vibe coding?
Daryl Moon:
Yeah. Look, I'll try and keep it short and sweet. But basically, I was working overseas and then returned to Australia in 2014. And obviously, was looking for a job because I'd been away for 10 years. And the IT industry, during that time, had changed a lot. I was a bit of a generalist, I'd done a bit of everything. A bit of application development, a bit of hardware, software, networking. So I came back to this environment where the job roles were very specialized and I was finding it a bit hard to find a role that really fitted me.
So I managed to find this one that was a contract just for a couple of weeks to fix up some spreadsheets and I thought, "Excel, I can do that." And that turned out to be fix up some spreadsheets that had all this data that they're importing into a CRM. A CRM, which at the time wasn't Salesforce, it was another product. And this other product had some gaps in it and it turned out to be a bit of vaporware. When we started talking about opportunities, while that was something that they were going to build. So they had the account and the contact functionality, but opportunities were something off in the future and that was a bit of a concern.
And it really came to a head when we wanted to raise some issues that we had with the existing functionality and discovered that this company was actually using Sales Cloud or Service Cloud to record these issues that we had. Our CEO at the time was a former Salesforce customer. Cut a long story short, we did a pivot and we switched to using Salesforce and I became the defacto accidental admin.
Mike:
It happens quite a bit.
Daryl Moon:
Yeah. So the next thing was, well, how does this Salesforce thing work? We had a partner that we were working with and they were great, and they were helping do some of the heavy lifting. But also, being able to work with those consultants, I was able to start and learn my way around the admin side of things. Of course, this was about 2014, 2015, just before we had Trailhead. So it was a bit of a learn and discover as you go, until Trailhead came out, until I got hold of some resources. There was fairly limited YouTube content around at the time, but there was some really helpful posts from people like Steve Mo and Jennifer Lee, and people like that, some of those. Jennifer's obviously joined your team, and Cheryl Feldman at the time. So yeah, that was the early days when I got started.
Mike:
Wow. So you've grown up on the platform for a lot of the time that I've been at Salesforce. This last, I would say, year-and-a-half, two years since AI has come, how has your learning and what you work on the platform changed since that?
Daryl Moon:
I've been a bit of a critic of the whole AI movement and the value of it, certainly at the start. But I would have to say probably over the last six months or so, I've been starting to see that there's a little bit more beyond just the smoke and mirrors and there is actually some value there.
Just to give an example, I'm a really keen fisherman. Now that I'm retired from full-time work, I can spend a bit of time doing that. I get these emails once a week from one of the local tackle shops and they tell me, for our four local rivers, what people have been catching, and where they've been catching, and when and what tackle they're using. And over a course of 12 months, I've got 50-odd emails and I thought, "It'd be great if I can grab all that content and summarize it, and maybe I can learn something."
Mike:
Yeah.
Daryl Moon:
So I cut and paste them all into one document, throw it into ChatGPT and said basically, "Summarize that for me." And it came back with a really great summary, and I went out fishing that weekend and caught six fish applying the knowledge that I'd got from that. So that was a bit of a turning point where I'm thinking, "Hang on, that's one thing it's really good at." Because it's a bit like weather forecasting, there's no black and white, true and false, 100% guarantee, but if it points you in the right direction and if it's able to take ... I think weather forecasting is probably a good analogy because there's so much data and you've got to try to make sense of it.
Mike:
Right.
Daryl Moon:
So applications like that, I think it's really well suited to.
Mike:
Yeah, I would agree. The amount of things that I've thrown at different AI models is always fun to say, "Here's a whole bunch of stuff, go figure it out."
So you have time, you listen to the podcast, you heard Josh talk about Agentforce Vibes. I've seen a demo of it at Dreamforce. And you were like, "You know what, I've got some time, I got extra fish," because you'd been out fishing. And you dug into it. Tell me what you found.
Daryl Moon:
Yeah. Actually, it was interesting because I was actually driving to the boat ramp at the time and it's about a 30-minute trip from home, which is perfect for an episode of the Admins Podcast.
Mike:
I'll keep that in mind so that we make sure this one's the same length.
Daryl Moon:
Yeah, so that worked out really nicely. Sometimes I try to play it when we're on a road trip with my wife, but she's not so keen, but sometimes.
Mike:
Yeah, nobody wants to listen to the Salesforce when it's just you.
Daryl Moon:
No, no.
Mike:
Because my jokes aren't that funny, I know because I read the iTunes reviews.
Daryl Moon:
Oh, that's all right. But look, that one caught my attention. And the other thing is Josh sounds very much like a very good friend of mine, Dr. Scott, his voice sounds so similar. So it always gets my attention when I hear him. I think, "Oh, that sounds like my good friend Dr. Scott."
Anyway, yeah, it got my attention and I thought, "Okay, what's this Vibes thing all about?" And I was actually preparing for an Apex Sales video on the new features in Spring '26 and I wanted to create a new developer org, a pre-release org, because I wanted to get some new features in that wasn't in my old pre-release org. So I went to sign up and it gave me a choice of professional, developer and unlimited roles, enterprise and unlimited. I thought, "Well, I'll try the enterprise."
I did that and it created it, and I logged in. And then when I'm going to set up, I saw this Agentforce Vibes. And I thought, "Oh, that's interesting. Let's have a look at that," and I jumped in to have a look. And it fired up and it opened a new browser window, and a whole bunch of stuff happened in the background. It asked me a few questions and I just said, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah." And then I'm stuck with a prompt. Okay, well, what do I do now? And I'm thinking, "Okay, so here's my chance to ask it if it can help build something."
So I thought, "Well, I'll just build something really simple that I know what it should look like and what it should feel like." So I decided just to build a little LWC, so a little lightning web component that I could put on a page that would show my current opportunities and allow me to edit the close dates on them. So give me a little component that shows my open opportunities and just let me hit edit and change the dates on it. So away I went and it built that, and I was really surprised. And it deployed it for me, so then I went to my homepage in that org and I put the component on the home page and I ran it. And I thought, "Wow, that's really amazing. Here's my little component, it seems to do everything that I wanted it to do." And I got in there and I started editing dates and hitting the save button, and oh, hang on. It didn't change the dates.
So I went back to it and basically explained that it wasn't saving the dates. And it had a nice conversational user interface and it'd go, "Oh, I see where the problem is. I'll just do this and I'll do that." And I'm going, "Okay, okay, okay." Did that a few times and deployed again and said, "Righto, now we're ready to go." And so I'd go back in and have a look, and oh, still not saving them. So I did that, went through a few iterations of that and I didn't get it. And I thought, "Oh, well, okay." But still, I was pretty impressed.
I was pretty impressed also, there's two stages. There's a plan and there's act button on the bottom of the little chat window. So when you start off, you start off in plan mode and it basically tells you what it's going to do. And you have a look through the script and you have a look through the feedback, and you can see, okay, it's going to create this and it's going to do that, and blah, blah, blah. So you can get a good idea of what is going to happen before you actually do it. Then you hit the act button and it goes, "Righto, now we're ready to roll," and off it goes and starts doing things. And it stops every now and again and it says, "Oh, now I want to edit this file. Is that okay?" And you say, "Yes," and it edits that file and you can see the changes occurring in the metadata on the screen beside you. And then it says, "Okay, I've done that, now I want to deploy that." And you say, "Okay."
So you've got control, which is good. I like that. So you've got control over it. And I'm not doing this in a production org, I'll just make that very clear. I'm doing this in a standalone pre-release developer org, it's a developer org. It's not connected to anything so it doesn't matter what I break. And I'm not pushing changes to production.
One of the questions that I got after I posted that to LinkedIn that I'd done this was, "What about a search facility?" And I thought, "Oh, okay. Yeah, I wonder if I can do that." So I went back to it and I said, "Can you add a search button to that?" And it basically said, "Yeah, okay." And a couple of okays later, we had a search button on there. It still wouldn't save the records, but we had a search so we could search for other opportunities that weren't displayed in that little component.
But then I'd got a bit more feedback and somebody said to me, and they basically called me out on it. They said, "Hang on. You're the Flow guy who is saying use the right tool for the right job. And then you're jumping in here with the developer tool not really knowing what you're doing and just willy-nilly going yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, go deploy this thing. That's a bit of a dilemma, isn't it? A bit of a contradiction?"
And to be honest, I said, "Yeah. Look, fair call. Absolutely fair call." But in this instance, I'm in a separated developer org, not doing anybody any harm. I can break things if I like. And I'm just in test mode, I'm just curious about what this thing can do.
Mike:
Right.
Daryl Moon:
And it builds something that I know what it would look like if I built it in Flow, then I can compare.
Mike:
Right.
Daryl Moon:
It's a bit like, Mike, if I was building maybe a rocket ship and the AI agent built the rocket ship for me. I'd have nothing to compare to because I've never built a rocket ship before. So it was a really analogy to build this little component, this lightning web component, with something I was familiar with. So yeah, I'm happy to cop that criticism because it was just basically I was just going to try it out and see what it could do.
Mike:
Right. No, I saw that as one of the first comments and it took me back to high school when I had to take a crazy algebra or geometry class. And I remember it was one of the first times you get a scientific calculator and there's all these buttons. And I remember the math teacher telling me, "Well, you should know the answer before you put it into the calculator. The calculator is just there to double check you."
And when Josh and I were talking about Agentforce Vibes, I pointed out your ... After we did the podcast and you posted that and I said, "I'm going to talk to Daryl." He said it really comes out to that calculator standpoint where you built something knowing it would replicate standard functionality, but you're doing that because now you know how to test the tool. You're not using the tool to duplicate standard functionality, you're using the tool so that you understand it and can test its outcome, so that when you do use it to build something you're not familiar with, now you know where to look for the gap, so I thought it was interesting.
Also, it's just wonderful that you have a great positive attitude towards somebody calling you out on something and not being defensive towards it.
Daryl Moon:
Oh, yeah, I'm a bit beyond that.
Mike:
I guess thinking through Agentforce Vibes and stuff now that you dug into it, what was something, I think we heard it in your response, but what was something that surprised you that you weren't expecting?
Daryl Moon:
Well, I've done some more testing since then.
Mike:
Oh, good.
Daryl Moon:
Yeah. And I thought, "Okay. So let's try maybe just a simple record-triggered flow." So let's create a flow in the lead record when the rating was set to hot. Let's just put a bit of text, just write a bit of text into the description field. And I thought, "That's nice and simple." I'll be able to read that metadata of the flow, I'll know whether it's worked. That'll be really simple and I can test it, know what the outcome's going to look like.
So I tried that and it got stuck. And I think this was at the end of a day where I'd been doing quite a bit of other stuff with Agentforce Vibes as well. One thing I missed was in the developer org with Vibes, you get 50, now I don't know what the unit is, but you get 50 units. Once you've used those up, Agentforce Vibes loses half its brain and is nowhere near as capable as what it was before.
Mike:
Yeah, it's all the tokens, you've used them up.
Daryl Moon:
Yeah, but it still kind of works. But if you didn't register that that's what happening. And it also seems to lose its ability to deploy stuff as well. So it kind of got a bit brain-dead on me and I got a bit frustrated with that and couldn't get it to work. So I left it for a couple of days, and then I'll come back and I'll try it again, and it managed to do it. Of course, because the credits have regenerated and now it's got smart again.
Mike:
Yeah.
Daryl Moon:
So I'm learning how this works. So then I think, "Okay, let's aim for the sky and let's try to build something really complicated." So I think, "Okay, what about we build a whole application?"
Mike:
Ooh.
Daryl Moon:
And let's do application for a recruiter, a job seeker.
Mike:
Okay.
Daryl Moon:
So we'll have recruitment type of app, but for the individual job seeker. So we've got an object with some jobs, and we've got applications, and we've got applicants, and we've got the whole process of recruitment in there as well. So I kind of described all this and it was a paragraph or two of text where I'd just used common business language and just explained what I wanted to do. And I did this in plan mode, and then I hit okay, go think about that. And it came back and it said, "Righto. So we need a custom object for jobs, and one for this, and one for interviews, and one for applications," et cetera. And I thought, "Wow, yeah, that's pretty clever. Let's now hit the action button and go build it."
And it actually went and built the majority of it, including right down to the fact that when you do an interview, I specified in the description at the start to send the email to the applicant who was unsuccessful. So when you're going through and you're selecting who you're going to interview, if somebody's not suitable, then send them an email. So it was going to use a flow to send that email out, and that's where it got stuck. And I think again, we'd ran out of tokens.
But up until that, we're talking it probably took me 15 minutes to write the description of what I wanted. In another half-an-hour after we'd gone through the planning stage and were going through several iterations of the actions it was taking, we basically had everything built. It just ran out of tokens then and got stuck on a few flows so we didn't actually get absolutely everything deployed, but it did deploy all the standard objects and everything. So yeah, I was blown away by that. That was amazing.
Mike:
Yeah. Now, I love you are so akin to me. You got something and you just threw spaghetti at the wall to test it. Because you sat down, "I want a thing," and you just started describing it to Agentforce Vibes. And I looked back at some of the documentation, and of course, like a lot of times when we demo product, we always want to demo best practices and really, one part showcased the product, another part also give people, "Here's the best way to use it." And a lot of the discussion that Josh and I had was around PRDs, or product requirement documentation, and how much those will give you.
I think it's ... I love the fact that you just sat down with Agentforce Vibes and just started throwing stuff at it to create an application. As opposed to an hour or two worth of homework and creating documents, and then giving it that. And you still go really close to an end result. I feel like what you spent for those 15 minutes was way faster than what you would have spent had you had to create all that other stuff.
Daryl Moon:
Oh, absolutely. And look, it thought of stuff and asked me questions about stuff as well.
Mike:
Oh, wow. Okay. See? That's the part of creating in Salesforce that admins have never had.
Daryl Moon:
Yeah.
Mike:
When we've been creating objects and creating fields that link objects together or flows, we never have the platform questioning us. It just assumes we're doing the best thing we can.
Daryl Moon:
Yeah. And it asked about, I don't remember which object it was, but one of them had asked what type of relationship it wanted between two objects.
Mike:
Ah.
Daryl Moon:
And it was leaning towards a lookup and offered some explanation as to why. And I just say, "Oh, yeah, okay. That sounds like a good idea." So I clicked that button for yes for that. So yeah, it was quite clever.
I also did say in my instructions, I did say because I'm more of a Flow guy than anything.
Mike:
Sure.
Daryl Moon:
I did say, "Do not use any Apex code. If automation is required, use Flow. Use dynamic lightning record pages in place of page layouts where possible. And also, create some test records for jobs, applicants, applications, interviewers, interviews, et cetera, and offers." And then later when I was doing it, because I thought the problem with flows was around the API version, I told it to use API version 60 for the flows to ensure compatibility. Because that was one of the problems that I'd discovered with some of the flows, that it was using the current version API 66, which is Spring '26. And it was getting stuck in the metadata trying to get some Flow type fields right. And I found if I went back a couple of releases, then it worked. And then I could go, "Okay, now switch it back to 66," and then it worked and it deployed.
Yeah. Look, it was fun. It was fun pushing the buttons and try to see how far it would go. I did also try to get it to build some ... Oh, now this was an interesting one. So I tried to get it to build a lightning record page for the lead that included the rating and description fields. Interestingly enough, and I didn't realize at the time, they weren't on the page. So they weren't on the page layout, those two fields. And when I said, "Go build a flow using those two fields," it came back and it said, "No, those two fields don't exist. Do you want me to create them?" And I'm going, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, hang on. Rating, description, they're standard fields." And I went back into Object Manager and had a look on the lead object, and looked at the field-level security and nobody had visibility of them.
Mike:
Oh.
Daryl Moon:
Not even admin. Yeah, so I don't know how that happened, but that was an out of the box, brand new developer org. So I turned those back on and tried again, and it managed to create the pages okay, but by this stage I'd run out of tokens again. When I ask it deploy it said, "No, I can't deploy, I don't do that. I'm not capable of doing that."
Mike:
I'm out of tokens, it's like a college kid.
Daryl Moon:
But it wasn't telling me that. That was something that happened an hour or two ago.
Mike:
Sure.
Daryl Moon:
Yeah. Yeah, fun times, fun times.
Mike:
I got to tell you, curiosity is the number one admin trait.
Daryl Moon:
Absolutely.
Mike:
So I love that you were clicking and stuff. I want to make sure that we hit your fishing time because we're coming up on, uh-oh, what happens if Daryl doesn't make it back in time. For admins who aren't retired or don't have three or four hours a day to create and mess around with something, what would your prescription of advice be to admins who want to try out Vibes? What should they do? How should they go about learning about it?
Daryl Moon:
I think do something like I did, which was recreate something that you're familiar with. So if you're comfortable creating a simple flow, then jump in and do that. So create yourself a new pre-release org, select enterprise. So then when you get logged in, you go over to set-up and it's on the set-up menu down there on the bottom, on the right-hand side. And you can choose Agentforce Vibes from there. And start off in the plan mode, so there's a little button at the very bottom that says plan or act, start off in the plan mode and just describe what you want to do. Just in plain English, create a ... And you don't have to say please and thank you, apparently that's not a thing with AI, so you can just tell it.
Mike:
You can.
Daryl Moon:
You can, yeah.
Mike:
Just I don't know if it appreciates it.
Daryl Moon:
I don't think so. I think it's wasting electricity. Yeah, because these AI models are super massive users of electricity.
Mike:
Yeah.
Daryl Moon:
So we don't want to waste any of those atoms. And just ask in plain English, create a record-trigger flow on XYZ object that does something when such-and-such field is populated, as simple as that. And just try it, hit the go button, see what it decides to use in the plan section. And if you're happy with that, hit act and see what it produces. And go right through to deployment, and then go and test it and see if it actually works the way you expect it.
You'll see it spit out the metadata as well on your page, so your Vibes page is like a multi-panel screen, and you'll see it spit out the metadata. If you've ever looked at metadata for a flow before, you'll see it there and you'll be able to read it. If not, it doesn't matter, you can just ignore it and just wait until it gets deployed. And then of course, you can open your flow in that environment anyway because it's just built a standard flow for you, there's nothing fancy about it and you can see exactly what it's done. And then I think advanced from that, go something a little bit more complicated after that.
Mike:
I like it. Daryl, I know this podcast is going to come out before TDX, so I'm just going to remind you and everybody listening, I hope you submit a session to talk at TDX about your learning experience with Agentforce Vibes. I think it would be really cool. That is, if you're willing to travel all the way over to America. I don't know what kind of fishing, there is fishing in San Francisco. I could probably Google that and find you some sort of fishing charter if that would help lure you over.
Daryl Moon:
I think it's the airfare that's going to be the problem, Mike.
Mike:
Yeah, it's not cheap. But on the flip side, maybe if you get on a boat right now, you might get here by April.
Daryl Moon:
Yeah, in my little boat, it will probably take me until then. Yeah. I did manage to get to Dreamforce in 2019, but that was because I'd won a Salesforce competition and got $1000 Visa card.
Mike:
Ah, jeez.
Daryl Moon:
That helped pay my airfare, so that was a great experience.
Mike:
Okay.
Daryl Moon:
But being an old retired fella, I don't know if the budget's going to stretch that far this time.
Mike:
I know, I hear you. But your talk is inspirational, so if anything I'm going to use the podcast to try and broadcast it out. If we can get you there or Dreamforce, I think it'd be really fun. I appreciate you taking time out of your day to talk about Agentforce Vibes and digging in. I hope, you said you had some vacation time coming up, so I hope good fishing.
Daryl Moon:
Yes. Big fishing trip planned for next week. So by the time this is broadcast, I should have been four days on the water and hopefully have a freezer full of fish. We'll see.
Mike:
Perfect. Then when you come back and people aren't around, you don't have to force them to listen to the podcast.
Well, Daryl, I appreciate you coming on the pod and sharing your story, and I appreciate you really just clicking through fearlessly and trying things out. I think that's the biggest spirit that I was always taught and it got me to where I am today, so thank you.
Daryl Moon:
Yes, it's been a long way from the ButtonClick Admin Podcast, Mike, which is where I first ran into you way, way, way back then.
Mike:
Yeah. It's still kind of the same, it's just evolved from it.
Daryl Moon:
Yes, yes, yes, for sure. All right, it's been fun. Thanks, Mike.
Mike:
You bet.
Big thanks to Daryl Moon for joining us and sharing his firsthand experience of diving into Agentforce Vibes. Whether you're curious about how AI fits into your admin toolkit, or maybe just need a little nudge to try something new, I think Daryl's story is a great reminder that exploration leads to insight. So if this episode sparked some ideas, go ahead and share it with your fellow Salesforce admins, share it on LinkedIn. Let me know what your experience with Agentforce Vibes was, I'd love to hear it. And of course, Daryl's a big fisherman, so if you have fish pictures, I'd love to see those posted, too. Share them with us. Until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.
Hosts & Guests
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