Trailblazer DX is known for product announcements and roadmap talks. But this year, there was more. “Sneak Peek” sessions gave all attendees access to early concept features still being built in a kind of “Community Advisory Board for All” experience. My colleague Christine Marshall wrote about the App Studio session. Another such session, which I attended, shared a new way to build user interfaces in Salesforce, which combined visual builders, code, and vibe coding – hybrid visual editing.
Hybrid visual editing (HVE) as a concept is not new. It has become a standard way for artists and creatives to cooperatively create work with AI agents in their favorite tools. Salesforce is beginning to look at how this might be brought into the world of building UI for enterprise software.
What Is HVE?
The best way to think about HVE is as a future replacement or version of something like Experience Cloud Builder. It’s a drag-and-drop WYSIWYG-type UI editor, but imagine instead that it is married to a multimodal coding agent.
It’s not unheard of to have AI coding agents today that allow you to share a wire frame, Excel sheet, web page, or even a screenshot and have it create that web page. The Hybrid Visual Editor would behave the same.
It’s also not unheard of for coding agents to only get most of the way toward a solution before needing human intervention. Whether that is a code review, a tweak, or a set of changes to fine-tune the initial inference-output UI, humans play a role. But how well the agent follows up once the human makes a change to the generated code can vary.
On the other hand, the HVE would be designed to work seamlessly with code contributions from either the agent or the human. The team laid out what seemed like some specific areas where they want Salesforce Developers and Admins to benefit from HVE in an MVP.
Minimum Viable Hybrid Visual Editing
Initially, the developer or admin would start by using a natural language prompt to build the basic UI. I could call this “vibe coding”, but I really want to emphasize that to me, this feature looked very squarely in the realm of a tool that admins would love, too. All visual, drag-and-drop, and squarely in the comfort zone of anyone who has used any of the Salesforce builder tools. It would also accept multi-modal inputs.
Once the initial design is generated, the user then has the opportunity to make changes in the visual space. There would be drag and drop options, and a properties side bar with what they term “pro-level styling for layout and spacing”.
After tweaking the visual design, they envision a “1-click agentic source sync”. Ostensibly, with a simple click of a button, the visual changes would be stored back on disk into real-life plain old source code. Not a massive XML, JSON, or YAML file, just source code.
The ‘wow’ factor feature they suggested to be part of the MVP is the ability for the agent to autodetect updates on reusable components. The specific example was tiles on a user interface. Let’s say you wanted to make all of the cards have a different padding, button color, or background. By clicking and changing just one, you could choose to automatically apply the changes to all instances of the reused component.
Considerations and Roadmap
Yes, I did say “plain old source code” a moment ago. The astute among you are now asking, “What kind of source code?” The product team offered up that the MVP would be focused on bringing ReactJS code to the HVE features. This makes sense, as a large part of Trailblazer DX was focused on the investment the Lightning Platform UI team has made in supporting ReactJS on platform. And let’s face it, there’s a lot more training data out there for React than LWC. But the roadmap did suggest LWC would follow in time.
The HVE features would initially be incorporated into Vibes IDE. It’s unclear, and I didn’t think to ask, but that would suggest it would work in the online browser version of Salesforce’s VS Code plugins, and maybe not in the desktop version? But we’ll have to keep an eye out for that.
Eventually, though, HVE would be brought to the new Low Code App Studio, which was also announced in the Sneak Peeks theater (and maybe even Slack). However, I suspect that may mean the developer tools for building Slack widget UI features, not in the core chat experience.
Looking Forward With Salesforce Features
As Christine and I spoke about in our day 1 and day 2 TDX podcasts, Sneak Peek features are so early that they may never come to the product – at least not in the form that we may have seen in the session. This was truly about the product team getting early feedback on concepts that they are trying out.
I think this says a couple of things about the state of product right now at Salesforce. First off, like the rest of the tech industry, Salesforce is working hard to figure out what the advent of Generative AI actually means to traditional business and enterprise apps. We all see it – the means of human interaction with software has expanded in ways that were unforeseeable 10 or maybe even 5 years ago. But how this actually goes on to shape what software looks and feels like to its builders and users long term is still anyone’s guess.
I had many conversations at TDX along the lines of “what a hard time it must be right now to be a product manager”. The rate of change in the foundational software that we build apps on is unprecedented. You can wake up any day and have assumptions you’ve built your product roadmap on exploded entirely, sending you back to the drawing board.
On the other hand, to me, these sessions signal a kind of renewed openness on the part of Salesforce product leadership to share new concepts and ideas earlier with more of its user base.
In speaking to the team running the Sneak Peek Theater, I learned that it was conceived of by Salesforce Admin Evangelist (and former Salesforce MVP) Jennifer Lee. Naturally, someone from the Admin Relations team would be advocating so fiercely for the practitioner community as a whole. But product leadership would have had to sign up for it and support their teams to participate, which says a lot about where Salesforce is at.
Summary
My verdict for now is that hybrid visual editing is a clever idea for how to incorporate human app development with generative AI inputs in a seamless way. It borrows an idea that currently exists primarily in video and image editing, but applies it to Salesforce’s traditional sweet spot: low-code application development. As always, it will have to come down to the execution, but if this team delivers, it could be an exciting refresh to building custom UI on the Salesforce platform that developers and admins alike might truly love.
As for the Sneak Peek Theater, more of this, please, Salesforce! If you were at TDX and saw something “forward-looking” that you liked, or if you had a different experience, we’d love to hear from you in the comments or on social media.
