Headless Agentforce Development

Headless development means building, running, and extending software without requiring the Salesforce platform UI. In Agentforce, it means building, deploying, and operating Agentforce agents without Agentforce Builder or Setup. Author your agents from your IDE or AI coding tool, invoke them through APIs, and expose them on any surface: web, mobile, Slack, voice, or a third-party agent host. This page covers headless development specific to Agentforce.

Headless Agentforce development is a set of tools that you can choose from based on what you’re building. Use this table as an inventory of tasks you can do without the platform UI and the Agentforce products that support each one.

Task	Tools and Features
Define an agent	Author an agent in Agent Script Scaffold and manage an agent with Agentforce DX Ground an AI coding tool with Salesforce skills Download Agent Script docs for offline grounding
Wire an agent to data and logic	Build custom actions with Apex REST Expose Apex methods as actions with InvocableMethod Query Salesforce data with named queries Manage data libraries with the ADL API
Expose an agent on a surface	Chat with agents programmatically using the Agent API Connect AI applications to Salesforce with MCP Return structured, typed responses with Lightning Types Build custom mobile UIs with Mobile SDK headless mode Build a custom web chat client with Custom Connections
Test an agent programmatically	Define and run agent tests with the Testing API Run agent tests from the CLI with Agentforce DX
Extend or debug with a coding agent	Install Agentforce-tuned skills for AI coding tools Connect AI coding tools to Salesforce with MCP servers Develop in VS Code with the Agentforce Vibes extension

Headless Development Tools: Explore your tooling options.
MCP Solutions: Salesforce’s Model Context Protocol servers for AI applications.
Agentforce Vibes: The AI-powered VS Code extension for Salesforce development.
Plugins and Skills: Reusable skill packages for AI coding tools.

Salesforce Developers: API Catalog Connect REST API — Track and manage the connected APIs and MCP servers registered in your org as you scale your headless solutions.