Agentia Headless: The new developer experience

Building with and for the developer community

Ash Finnegan [00:04]

Hi, everybody, and welcome to another episode of "CopadoCast," the podcast series that's all around helping teams that get ships done. The builders, the architects, the testers, everybody who's involved in the whole Salesforce development process. And I'm super excited to be welcomed by one of my favorite employees of the company, Martin. Martin has a very important role, and he really knows our community because he was a developer, is a developer, and everything he does is always done with a developer in mind. So Martin, can you give me a little introduction to yourself and your role?

Martin [00:40]

Thank you, Ash. My role is basically running engineering and trying to deliver all the products of Copado. And since the beginning, also, a very important part of that role is actually understanding what problems we need to solve now, being very close to the software community, software developer community, and understanding in particular everything that they are facing, those challenges, and what we might need to actually figure out solutions. And I hope that over the last 15 years, we have been delivering solutions for them.

Ash Finnegan [01:10]

Yeah, because you were one of the first employees, weren't you?

Martin [01:12]

The first one.

Ash Finnegan [01:13]

Yeah. And you've worked very closely with obviously our co-founder, Fede.

Martin [01:17]

Mm-hmm.

Ash Finnegan [01:17]

Who can't be here today. He's off ill. So we're very much blessed to be with Martin. So I've got some questions for you, and they come from various different people across the company, so I'm going to make sure I get them right.

Martin [01:29]

Yeah.

Ash Finnegan [01:29]

So the very first one is, we've got over 145,000 community members, developers, admins, architects, release managers. What does building with and for a community that size feel like from your perspective?

Martin [01:46]

The feeling is responsibility, a challenge, huge responsibility. And actually, the reason we exist is that community. We are building software for them. We are trying to solve their problems. So we are trying to be as close as possible, and I'm so happy that we have so much interaction with the community and feedback, and they are basically building, with us, the solution.

Ash Finnegan [02:12]

Yeah, and I think that's one of the reasons I was excited about working for Copado, because it's built by developers for developers. You're at the heart of the thick of it.
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Why AI adoption is outpacing business impact

Ash Finnegan [02:20]

We also just launched our new State of Salesforce AI Delivery 2026 report, and some of the findings were quite interesting, and I'd love to get your take on some of them. Like for example, the report says that 90% of developers now use AI in their work. When you read that, does it match what you're seeing? And does it matter if the adoption is high, but the impact seems to be a little bit slower in the day-to-day business processes?

Martin [02:50]

That is very good question, Ash, because everybody is really excited with that. Everybody is using, and Salesforce is releasing more and more tooling for developing using AI, and we have Claude, and we have OpenAI and Guru and everything that you can use. So developers are really excited. You can see that the adoption, all the fear that used to exist a couple of years ago, at the beginning of the year, the accuracy of those models are so accurate and can handle common context architecture, and they actually are solving problems, and the call is reliable. That's happening in one hand. But on the other hand, the feedback that we have from the customer is saying, "Yes, I'm investing a lot in changing my way of working sometimes," and the team is working really hard, but the business is not actually perceiving the impact of that. No. The companies are not having all the innovation that they would love to have.

Ash Finnegan [03:45]

Yeah. There seems to be a lot of uncertainty, I think, around the trust side of it as well.

Martin [03:49]

Mm-hmm.

Ash Finnegan [03:49]

And that did come out in the report a little bit more because when we looked at it earlier, it said only 10% of professionals describe it as fully embedded in their workflows. Half have no AI project on the horizon. So everyone seems to be using it, but nobody has actually changed how they're doing it, like their day-to-day work. We're all kind of experimenting and kind of working it out. Is that what you're seeing, too?

Martin [04:14]

Absolutely. Absolutely, and happened to our teams as well. Now, if you think software development has been done during the last, I don't know, 50, 40 years, in a very traditional way. At the beginning it was like waterfall process, and later in like the past 20 years, we have Agile. So you have some process to follow, and building software is not just about the tooling. No. You have to have the process. You have to have the skills and the people with the mindset to actually embrace new methodologies of working. So what we see is, okay, everybody's losing the fear to the technology, to the tooling, but nobody's changing the way of working. Nobody's adapting to that. So what we see is that a huge, bigger, and deeper transformation is required in the teams developing software to actually reach the speed of innovation that those customers, the company, the businesses, is actually expecting.
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Bringing Agentia Headless into the developer’s IDE

Ash Finnegan [05:09]

And that probably brings us to our next topic, because you mentioned there, there's a lot of AI tools. There's a lot of people's favorite place to work or favorite tool to work. So I'm going to get into the heart of it with Agentia Headless. Because obviously that's really going to change the game for how people use and interact with Copado because they are starting to experiment with other tools and where they want to work. Can you give me a little bit of an overview of what Agentia Headless is?

Martin [05:39]

Absolutely. It's my favorite project this year and for the past years of Copado. I'm really, really excited with this one. Because like everybody else, I believe the entire industry, not just Copado, we're noticing, okay, the main user of the tooling is actually changing. And the developers are having a stronger voice, and they are using AI, and they are trying to ship and deliver faster. And when you think about the role of Copado on that particular software development process, we have more than 300 features to actually treat the metadata, test the metadata, enforce quality gates, merging and resolving conflict, synchronizing sandboxes, and resolving nested component, and many particular thing that you need to do in order to move those changes into production. So Headless is all about taking all that powerful tooling and putting that in the hands of the developer, where the developer is working in the IDE. So, we have an IDE, we have a new CLI that is basically exposing all that tooling.

Martin [06:44]

We have on top of that, an MCP server, so the agent, an MCP and skills. So the agent that is for the developer, if you're using Guru or Claude, the agent can understand how to properly use the tooling and resolve all the problems that they later are going to face. So we are sort of modifying the role of the developer, and he's not only now responsible of actually building the software, but he's going to help a lot on actually delivering the software and shipping and reaching production.

Ash Finnegan [07:18]

Yeah, and like you said, taking that friction away from changing screens and having to move across multiple products. So it's definitely one I'm super excited about, and I know we've had a lot of really positive feedback from the community-

Martin [07:30]

Mm-hmm

Ash Finnegan [07:30]

... which we'll touch on a little bit later.

From release manager workflows to developer agents

Ash Finnegan [07:32]

But before we do that, take me back to the beginning. Where did the idea come from, and what were you seeing that made you think that this needed to exist? Because we've been doing this for 15 years, and now you're like, "This is something we need to do."

Martin [07:46]

Yeah. And so at the beginning, so over 13 years, we were producing one role in the company. That was the release manager. Now, the release manager was the role responsible to reach in production to meeting a deadline, and actually trying to merge and move everything with quality to production. And during that, to be transparent, and during those time, we neglected the role of the developers, or not the role, but I would say the importance on that moving software in the pipeline process. But we focus so much in the release manager that basically we have been building everything for him. And when we started saying, "Okay, the developer has to do," like you mentioned, the context switch, and they are working in the local environment, they're working with IDE. When they finish to actually do the change, they need to move to our system and shift the context and actually select the metadata, understand what are you doing, triggering a commit process, passing the quality gates. And that was generating some friction with the developer because the process for

Martin [08:57]

them was slower. So we decide, okay, we're going to move everything for the developer, where the developer is. Immediately after, we recognize that the developer is no longer the developer. The developer is actually the agent of the developer. So we say, okay, the UI is the actual friction. No, the UI is great for human, has been working over a very long time for humans, but is not working for AI. So it's not just that we do IDE or CLI, we have to put an MCP. We have to put the same tooling, the skills, and actually help not just the developer, but the actual user that is going to be the agent of the developer.

Ash Finnegan [09:35]

Yeah. Oh my God. So we kind of built this, like most people are trying to do now, for humans and agents to be able to enjoy the experience and get it done.

Martin [09:44]

Mm-hmm.

Flexible workflows with production as the goal

Ash Finnegan [09:44]

Yeah, it's quite exciting. So yeah, the next people we set out-- So you are one of the first people through the door at Copado. You've already highlighted you are number one employee. How does building Agentia Headless feel different from the stuff that you were building in the beginning? You talked a lot about the original problems. So have the problems changed? Is it different?

Martin [10:09]

Let me think. It's a good question. The problem is the same. We need to reach production. Without actually reaching the users of the business with your changes, there is no value, regardless whatever you do. So the problem is the same one. We need to understand problems, code the solution, but reaching production is the mission. We were working over these years, in our process, in our UI, with our methodology, and one of the challenges I have right now going where the developer is working, that every single developer is working in different way. So one of the challenges that I have right now is actually understanding that every single way of working for the developers, some of them require a different branch of strategy. Some of the developers love to have some steps. Some of the developers love to have some quality gates local, other cloud. So we need to become more flexible for the developers, for the developer agents. That is challenging, but I think that we are bringing the tooling with enough

Martin [11:12]

flexibility for the developers to figure out how they want to use these 300-plus different features and solutions.

Agents as users and the pipeline as a trust channel

Ash Finnegan [11:20]

Yeah, no, it's quite interesting, which probably brings me to my next question quite well, because we often use internally, agents are users, not features. What does this actually mean in the real...

Martin [11:33]

Yeah, they are going to become more and more the primary interface to all the systems. If you think about Salesforce or any other system, the main interface between the human and the system is going to be AI. It's going to be some sort of agent. And the agent, what you have is the capability of understanding requirements and actually executing some actions. Of course, the developer is developing, and what we are trying to also incorporate into the framework for that agent and that development is how to actually use the tool. That's the best practice that they need to follow in order to avoid conflict later in the pipeline, in order to pass all the quality gates. And the one thing that we are trying to put around the agent, and the most important thing, I believe, that we are doing right here is trying to ensure that the pipeline becomes the trust channel for the business. They saying, okay, everybody's using-- And imagine in a large company, you have 100-plus developers doing changes. The business is going to be afraid of breaking production because breaking

Martin [12:44]

production means stopping the business. That is not affordable. You cannot fix a P1. So the pipeline is the channel to ensure trust on the changes through governance. You have security scanning, compliance, quality gates, merging properly the changes, synchronizing all the things, treating the metadata to avoid dependencies, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So what we are doing right now is saying, okay, if I can move all that governance around the agent and the developer, actually everything that they are going to be moving later is going to have this framework of trust and framework of this was done within the governance. Everybody's aware. The release manager is aware of everything that is going on, and that will actually speed up and accelerate the innovation for the business.

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Community feedback, extensions, and getting started

Ash Finnegan [13:33]

Yeah, and it's quite exciting, where it's going. And it's taking on to my next question because we talked a lot at the beginning around community.

Martin [13:41]

Mm-hmm.

Ash Finnegan [13:41]

The fact that we have the community, they're so important to us. We build with and for the community. So we already know that we give them a pilot of Agentia Headless. How has that gone?

Martin [13:55]

So far, I'm actually impressed. We have thousands of downloads the first week of preview. Our huge community in India is actually already talking and posting about use cases. The thing that I like a lot about our system is, by default, it's extensible. We recognize that our community is more capable of figuring out the problems that they are trying to solve. So if we provide them with not just with a solution, but with a platform to extend and combine solutions and create and solve new use cases, they are way more creative than us. So we have right now a program going on to actually enable the community to extend, figure out, share feedback, publish, and share the solution with the rest of the community, and that is going really, really well. And the people can go to the developer today. You can go to developer.copado.com.

Ash Finnegan [14:49]

Yeah.

Martin [14:49]

And actually, you will find how to download all the different components of Headless, how to extend it, how to publish your extensions, and I hope that they enjoy it. The feedback so far is very good.

Ash Finnegan [15:02]

Yeah, no, that's fantastic, and I love it. Like, for me, again, built by developers for developers, a business that actually cares about what it's doing and what people actually want. So for me, that, I think, is phenomenal. And as a marketing person, it's great because I can actually tell real stories and can say that it is built and that it is solving real problems.
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Hackathons and the next wave of community collaboration

Ash Finnegan [15:21]

So, we talked a little bit about, with the Headless and with the community and your pilot. How do you see your relationship with the community moving forward? Have you got any extra things that, your new things you're going to be working with them on?

Martin [15:35]

What we are doing right now is launching a hackathon, actually several events for the champions of the community. We are trying to accelerate as much as possible on the adoption and mainly to receive feedback and iterate, and just with the community that we have, with the users and champion that we have. And basically, that is so far been great, and we are planning to have some events as well. But everything is going to be on the site, and we are just right now launching this, that we have started really soon. The feedback so far is great, and we are going to be moving really fast with all the feedback of them.
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Join the CopadoCast conversation

Ash Finnegan [16:14]

Yeah, no, that's fantastic. And remember, CopadoCast, this podcast series is for the teams that get ships done. So we will find, we will be inviting many members of the community to come on and speak about the real challenges, the problems, the things that are really happening day to day. This is what this series is about. Starting with Martin was obviously a great way because we will be bringing on members of our community to talk about their experience with Headless, the good things, the bad things, and what they want from it. But Martin, thank you so much for being the very first guest on CopadoCast.

Martin [16:51]

Such an honor.

Ash Finnegan [16:52]

Yeah. And like I said, maybe the next one, maybe we can invite someone from the community to speak to you directly-

Martin [16:57]

Absolutely

Ash Finnegan [16:57]

... on this.

Martin [16:57]

Absolutely.

Ash Finnegan [16:58]

I think that could be a very exciting new series to do. But if you ever have an opinion or want a voice to be able to talk about your experience of developing on Salesforce, any business application, or using Copado, I would love to hear from you. If you reach out to myself or the team, and we can find us at CopadoCast@copado.com, we would love to hear from you and welcome you to take a seat here alongside one of our many hosts who can talk about your experience and help you help other developers in the community with your experience. So again, if you want to take part, please email CopadoCast@copado.com. But for the moment, I want to say a massive thank you to Martin and to you, and we look forward to our next session. Thank you.

Martin [17:46]

Thank you.