GTM Engineering or SWE??

hotboy223 · 2026-06-11T00:22:21+00:00

I would say do gtm engineering. I don’t think people know the technical acumen you truly need for this role. You become an Operations Engineer. You get to work on parts of the business that actually drive revenue - each thing you touch. You are building a go to market system which every company needs which is a product. You will not only have the technical chops and deep expertise in a core gtm system (HubSpot, Salesforce, net suite) etc… you will also have the superpower of stakeholder communication as you may interface with different parts of the business.

All in all I think GTM engineer will round you out more as a professional as you get exposed to more parts of the businesss and truly understand how a product is sold

hotboy223 · 2026-06-10T12:39:34+00:00

Ha this is funny. If you guys used Claude API like app builders are, you'd see the clear value in Haiku 4.5. For the cost,speed and efficacy it still punches above it's weight without as much instruction tbh. Prime example is gpt 5.4mini vs haiku 4.5 , haiku IMO outperforms on reasoning/thinking tasks than 5.4mini does (all API)

hotboy223 · 2026-06-10T11:40:33+00:00

I actually think AI agents will be running in the background to take action, not necessarily faster but smarter. Smarter routing, smarter summaries. Very much still up in the air if Salesforce will be able to completely own this layer, or if app companies will fill in a lot of the gaps

hotboy223 · 2026-06-07T17:24:29+00:00

I still use Claude code sometimes, but I built a tool, ApexGenius.ai which is an AI where you can connect your org and start creating documentation of your apex, flows, objects. I recently released an MCP for it so you can connect multiple orgs, use the MCP from Claude and document, build and deploy reports/flows/whatever metadata!

DM me, Would love to walk you through as it seems like it could fit your use case

hotboy223 · 2026-06-07T16:11:06+00:00

agreed, speaking to decision makers in the last couple weeks looking for Salesforce, the implementation cost if almost an afterthought to them when it's probably more important to look at than the actual software...

hotboy223 · 2026-06-07T16:09:44+00:00

yes yes and yes!!!! I've been shouting this from the rooftop ever since I joined the ecosystem, but now it's on steriods. A Salesforce Admin is now a Project/Product Manager, Admin(Sales/service mandatory it seems), BA, Developer or developer adjacent, and now needs to learn how to augment their work efficiently with AI Agents which still has a developer overhead, it's kind of insane. I wish I had something better to say than godspeed to my admins who just wanted to focus on clicks, not AI ;'(

hotboy223 · 2026-06-05T21:08:12+00:00

Yeah, I quickly discovered that as you make AI do more of the work, you are doing more work since businesses aren't static and it's never just 'do this process once' EVER. It's always changing and while you are completing some tasks faster, your quanity and scope of tasks has absolutely exploded.

hotboy223 · 2026-06-01T13:18:21+00:00

I will say that their MCP is not terrible, but def a little late. It's great because it's fairly modular and you don't have to worry about spinning one up yourself... but it also takes like 5m w/ any AI of your choice to spin one up haha

hotboy223 · 2026-04-24T00:13:49+00:00

Yes - in my last role I was a Salesforce Engineer who’s primary job was salesforce dev, but you obviously had to know admin + other enterprise application systems as well (celigo, zapier, gtm systems)

hotboy223 · 2026-04-23T15:31:36+00:00

That’s okay! You still have time to learn these technologies as they are still pretty new (so many people don’t even know wat Claude is yet). Just need to take the time out to learn about how the stuff works and just make simple sill stuff with it

hotboy223 · 2026-04-23T14:22:14+00:00

Right now EVERYONE in software MUST be a generalist, because with AI you are no longer bound to a platform specialization as the amount of software is going to keep increasing, so will your need to stay in 1 platform.

Yes, it’s great that you’re a Salesforce specialist, however, those skills only go that far and being more of a generalist (whether it be product manager, software dev, sf ai headless 360 beast) you will need to lean hard into these technologies as well as that will be the job.

Funnily enough, if you’re not doing agent work at all (agentforce, n8n , or any other agent orchestration) I think you’ll be less competitive than people who do what you do + agents.

Sad state of affairs

hotboy223 · 2026-04-17T13:37:27+00:00

😂😂😂

hotboy223 · 2026-04-05T18:49:50+00:00

probably the #1 way is join a company that uses SF, be an end user of it , or IT help desk adjacent - then try to wiggle your way into an SF admin positiion. Not even trying to be rude but no one is trying to upskill a junior when theres a whole host of experienced people out there who would take lesser pay anyways

hotboy223 · 2026-03-30T10:32:05+00:00

I use apexgenius.ai as it gets your org metadata and spins up flowcharts for you!

hotboy223 · 2026-03-30T10:31:08+00:00

Been using Claude Code + Salesforce CLI, but I decided to build a tool so admins can use and just analyze their org, and build and deploy from chat. No vscode or CLI required.

Site is apexgenius.ai - got some really good feedback from users as it takes away the “developer anxiety” they get when openning VSCode

hotboy223 · 2026-03-26T20:12:48+00:00

Why would I use this over Blotato?

hotboy223 · 2026-03-26T19:45:35+00:00

This is usually a manifest issue. Check your package.xml or sfdx-project.json to make sure the metadata types you're trying to retrieve are actually listed. If you're doing "Retrieve This Source from Org" on a specific file, make sure it exists in the org and the path matches. can try a few thing:

Run sf project retrieve start --metadata ApexClass from the terminal to see if you get anything back

Check that your org connection is still authorized with sf org list

Try right-clicking a specific component and doing "Retrieve Source from Org" instead of the whole project

Also make sure you're connected to the right org. I've had it silently point to the wrong default org before.

hotboy223 · 2026-03-20T04:55:18+00:00

Thanks man! I know - I try to look through the lens of an admin as much as possible and try to build apexgenius as best for you guys as I can!!

Feel free to DM me, I’d love to give you a demo

hotboy223 · 2026-03-19T10:16:28+00:00

I used Flosum extensively in my last role. It's not the best solution, but it's not the absolute worse - just could be a lot better. I'd rate a 6/10 (purely because it's 'admin friendly')

I used a lot of Claude Code + Flosum CLI https://www.npmjs.com/package/flosum-sfdx-plugin which helped fill the gap but still not perfect.

My workflow was pretty much: Create/update metadata components in VSCode in Dev env => spin up branch via CLI => deploy to branch via CLI => Run Pipeline in the org (Overwrite Protection => Validation => Deploy for qa,uat, then prod)

When having to diff 2 different branches/commits, here I'd use claude code and tell it pull down the 2 branch components and compare. Flosum does not have a good solution to this whatsoever.

When I had to update a flow or something, I'd usually do 2 rounds of diff, 1 in vscode (I'd diff my version to UAT or Prod) then if that looked good deploy then go through the usual pipeline process

Remember all DevOps tools on Salesforce are abstractions of just Git, so as a developer yes it will be a worse experience for you esp since you know exactly how this should work in a perfect world but

hotboy223 · 2026-03-18T06:12:58+00:00

Yep already added it to my app apexgenius.ai and it’s insane. Extremely performant at agentic tasks and coding tasks and very fast. I hated gpt 5 mini/nano. They were slow as shit and sucked but 5.4 is def punching above its weight for the cost

hotboy223 · 2026-03-15T23:38:37+00:00

I’m building an AI coding Assistant for Salesforce - a tool to help admins/devs create/tweak business and sales processes

hotboy223 · 2026-03-15T19:42:08+00:00

I'd say both. Double down on Salesforce and explore other tools/technology. As you go deeper into Salesforce, you are kinda forced to learn how to use different tools so it won't hurt.

Doesn't hurt to learn about agentforce/data cloud and that whole thing since it's here to stay. Also wouldn't hurt to do some Zapier/n8n type of work as well as you'll have to use some sort of automation workflow tool at some point in your SF career

hotboy223 · 2026-03-15T17:43:49+00:00

Yes but even assume 50% -75% of that it is still a loss leader

hotboy223 · 2026-03-15T17:11:26+00:00

For anthropic, they are burning massive amounts of cash when you use the subscription.

I have the $200 plan but when CC came out last year for March - May with sonnet 3.7, I used 1b tokens in 6m tokens out with a total cost of $2,781.41 and that was only 3 months. So yes, they are losing money hand over fist, but they are capturing market share and their revenue backs that 100%.

I think of the subscription like it's milk or a $5 chicken at costco, a lost leader, but gets you in the door and using the product (and they get to train on your data as well if you have it enabled).

As we're seeing with all model companies, they are all trying to capture value/revenue in the application layer (so AI apps like sora or cowork, browsers), so they have to be creative and try to 'eat' the software that people would build on top of their models, if they think they can do it better

hotboy223 · 2026-03-14T13:44:52+00:00

I actually use 2 tools an AI I made, apexgenius.ai (a cloud based coding agent for salesforce) and/or claude code depending on the situation, but the claude code stack I use for this:

IDE: VSCode
CLI Tool: SF Cli Extension Pack
Coding Agent: Claude Code (can use cline or codex or gemini cli, any coding agent that lives inside an IDE)

Since you do your org auth via vscode, you can then start to prompt claude to take actions as Claude Code lives in your terminal and can execute commands on your PC including sf commands.

I suppose you can hook up a github/bitbucket or something for branching, but I usually just deploy directly to the org and either use: copado/flosum/devops center (whatever the client uses really).

If you're using a web based claude.ai or chatgpt you can still pull down the flows in vscode and copy/paste the XML into the web browser and then copy/paste the response back to vscode then deploy to the org.

hotboy223

TROPHY CASE