🤖 Work in the Age of AI

Happy Saturday!

I had a colleague ask an interesting question this week: 

“Is there a way expand the default size of the long text area component in a screen flow?”

How to default this to a big size?

Her goal was to use a screen flow on records with long text area fields.

When the flow processed the records, she wanted most of the field content to show up right away in the screen, without manual resizing.

She searched the AppExchange but hadn’t found any good solutions yet.

By chance, I’ve been practicing LWC development the past few weeks and I knew Claude could generate a LWC a flow could use.

I asked Claude: "Could you write an LWC that shows a long text area field as an input? I want to use it in a screen flow. And could we make the number of rows showing (the height of the box) a configurable property?"

Moments later Claude had generated a working LWC.

I opened up VS Code for my Trailhead environment, pasted in the LWC code, and deployed.

Then I built a quick flow to test it out...

In the flow builder the new LWC showed up right away in the custom component list.

Perfect!

It worked well, too. Exactly as intended.

I shared the LWC with my colleague, who was able to use it to solve her client request by defaulting the number of rows that appeared to 10.

Awesome.

You can copy the LWC yourself from this GitHub Repo, if you like.

Total solution time: ~15 minutes

Skill level required:  Almost none. (Have VS Code installed)

I bring up AI development again because it is a fundamentally different outcome than only a few months ago.

Today, anyone can quickly create LWCs that are effective.

There was once an idea of a trade-off between good, fast, and cheap.

The joke was you got to "pick 2 out of 3".

AI has broken that paradigm.

This story illustrates how you can deliver all three.

Why does it matter? 

Salesforce has positioned itself as the low-code/no-code CRM.

And it’s true: Flow Builder gets more powerful every day.

But the skillset of writing code is no longer a limiting factor.

You can buy that skill for $20/month from Claude or from other LLMs.

And the code is generated faster than any human used to write it.

I think this creates a new career niche in the Salesforce ecosystem.

• Yes, learn how flows work
• But also learn enough development in Apex/LWC to prompt an AI to write useful code for your org

If you can create production-ready code in an minutes that previously would take hours, that’s a huge value add.

You no longer need to know everything about development yourself.

As long as you can work with an AI to output Apex or LWCs then you are, in effect, a world class Salesforce developer.

That's like adding 2-3 years of development experience to your resume in only a few moments.

Many job roles will be re-defined in a world where good, fast, and cheap can be generated on demand.

So how do we stay valuable to our companies and our customers?

By adding the ability to work with AI to your talent stack.

You can be the person to quickly implement any functionality offered by Apex/LWC, for example.

But writing code isn't the only valuable skill in the age of AI...

AI Agents are Coming (Here) 

The CTO of HubSpot has a project called agent.ai

On agent.ai, there are a number of AIs you can "hire" to do stuff for you.

Think of agent as a bot who can do work for you.

They can analyze LinkedIn profiles, optimize your website for conversions, or help you maximize your PTO usage.

We'll be able to hire all sorts of bots to do all sorts of tasks.

Imagine telling a bot you have a budget of $350 and want to book a flight to another city.

The AI bot will be able to book the flight and email you all the details.

Now you don't have to handle your travel anymore, the bots can do it for you.

Both people and companies will utilize these tools all the time in the coming months/years.

Hundreds of tasks that we routinely do will be "outsourced" to the bots.

The AI agents aren’t as good at the tasks as the best humans are yet.

But they soon will be. 

(Just like how ChatGPT improved tremendously after a year).

Most people don’t realize this.

But someone is still going to need to tell the bots what to do.

Someone will need to provide the context to the bots about what is a valuable task for them to complete.

That someone should be you.

Spend time every day using AI.

• Ask it questions.
• Have it help you build formulas.
• Make it write code.
• Generate images with it.
• Make it tell you about complex concepts you want to learn.
• Dictate your emails to it and ask it to proof read.
• Stay on top of the AI Agents and see how they might be used to help you or your company

This skill is going to be the new baseline for effective work.

To Recap:

• Anyone can quickly create high quality Apex or LWCs using Claude
• There will be a niche for people who can do this in the Salesforce ecosystem (even if you're just a flow builder)
• AI makes "good, fast, and cheap" possible at the same time
• AI bots are going to take over lots of tasks humans currently do (and you'll want them to!)
• By adding an ability to get results through AI tools (like Claude and agents) to your talent stack, you can stay valuable

I certainly don't know what the future is, but I hope at least one of these ideas is useful for you :)

Best,

Nick