Playbooks

A work queue tells the truth A managed-services queue is a better test of an agent system than a polished chat window. The queue contains half-formed requests, old decisions, production risk, impatient users, and work that still has to land. Imagine a request that says an invoice stopped syncing. The useful context sits across a ticket, an integration map, last month’s release notes, a Salesforce baseline, and the memory of the consultant who fixed it before. ...

Read the org before you design the answer The most expensive phrase in a mature Salesforce org is, “We think that is how it works.” A field feeds a Flow. The Flow updates a record that triggers Apex. Apex calls middleware, and the operations team still keeps a spreadsheet because the record cannot be trusted. None of that fits cleanly into a requirements deck. I start with the org itself. The first pass covers metadata, automation, permissions, integrations, deployment shape, old decisions, and the places where change is likely to hurt. In parallel, I watch people do the work. Metadata shows what can happen. A walkthrough shows what people actually depend on. ...

A plan becomes real when it becomes a repo A good architecture note is still an idea. The work becomes real when another person can clone the repo, run the command, inspect the evidence, and get the same answer. I use Claude while the problem is still fuzzy. I use Codex once the direction needs to become files. For a Salesforce org scan, those files include inventory scripts, structured metadata output, Markdown deliverables, validation checks, tests, CI, deployment notes, rollback steps, and smoke tests. For a business tool, they include the API contract, runtime tools, guardrails, evals, traces, and the product surface that an operator will actually use. ...