These guest blog posts are quirky (and sometimes dark) short stories with a dash of technology and a sprinkle of humor.
By Doc Silicon
We were somewhere around Moscone Center, on the edge of SoMa, when the AI began to take hold. I remember saying something like “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive…” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge salespeople, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to TrailblazerDX.
Buy the ticket, take the ride… and if it occasionally gets a little heavier than what you had in mind, well… maybe chalk it up to forced evolution.
It wasn’t until I arrived at Moscone that I fully comprehended the GRIM NATURE of our situation. The attendance was noticeably thinner than previous years—a ghostly shadow of its former self. No Golden Hoodies in sight. No costumed Trailblazer characters dancing through the halls. Just the dull, throbbing pulse of CORPORATE STRATEGY beating beneath the veneer of community.
“As your attorney, I advise you to rent a very fast camel,” my attorney wasn’t there to say. I was on my own, adrift in a sea of AI jargon and diminished expectations.
The keynote began with Patrick Stokes—Salesforce EVP and PROPHET OF THE MACHINE AGE—pacing the stage like a circuit-addled televangelist. His pupils were dilated to the size of small blueberries as he introduced the concept of “AgentBlazers.” The term hit my eardrums like a death knell for the old order.
“AgentBlazers are pioneers who are building a world where humans and digital agents collaborate,” Stokes proclaimed, his voice gradually shifting octaves, alternating between human and something DISTINCTLY MECHANICAL.
I could have sworn his skin began to shimmer with a metallic hue under the stage lights. Was I the only one seeing this?! I frantically scanned the audience for signs of recognition, but they sat there, docile, accepting—perhaps already CONVERTED.
Stokes continued to drone about addressing “workforce challenges caused by slowing global population growth”—a message that seemed WILDLY DISCONNECTED from the concerns of the poor bastards in attendance. These were DEVELOPERS and ADMINS, for Christ’s sake! They didn’t come to hear about GLOBAL DEMOGRAPHIC TRENDS. They came for practical knowledge about a platform that pays their mortgages.
I slipped out during a particularly hallucinatory segment about the “Law of Infinite Scale” and found refuge in the exhibition hall, that bizarre bazaar of techno-shamans hawking their digital elixirs. The floor pulsed beneath my feet like a living organism, the walls breathing in rhythm with some unseen artificial intelligence.
“TOO WEIRD TO LIVE, TOO RARE TO DIE!” I muttered to myself, observing the traditional Salesforce developers—those Apex-coding dinosaurs caught in digital limbo. Neither fully obsolete nor embraced in Salesforce’s brave new world.
The Elements.cloud booth drew me in like a tractor beam. Their demonstration of “Process Configuration Mining” was clearly the work of digital ALCHEMISTS. Ian Gotts, their CEO—a man with the intense gaze of someone who’s seen the other side—explained how they’d automated work that previously “required thousands of hours of billable consulting.”
“We’re COMMODITIZING COGNITIVE LABOR,” he didn’t actually say, but might as well have. I understood the implications immediately: we were witnessing the DEATH OF THE CONSULTANT CLASS. The room swayed.
I needed air—and information from the underground. I stumbled into a dimly lit bar three blocks from Moscone, where a cadre of disenchanted developers huddled around a table strewn with empty glasses and crumpled Salesforce certification vouchers.
“Agentforce is impressive, but I’m not sure if it directly impacts my day-to-day work yet,” whispered one, glancing nervously over his shoulder.
Another leaned in, pupils constricted to pinpricks: “It feels more tech-driven than customer-driven, unlike earlier Salesforce innovations.”
A third developer, clearly running on fumes and caffeine, grabbed my arm with surprising strength: “Maybe let’s start with allowing us to deploy correctly the big daily pain points that can be sharing rules, duplication rules, roles, profiles…” His voice trailed off as he stared into the middle distance, haunted by deployment errors.
When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. These developers were doing just that—adapting to survive while their platform underwent a metamorphosis around them.
I returned just in time for Charlie Isaacs’ Robotforce demonstration. The show floor PULSED with dangerous energy as he unveiled a scenario involving a “malfunctioning windmill.” The robot sprang to life, receiving commands from the Agentforce API. The crowd gasped in manufactured admiration, but all I could see was the BEGINNING OF THE END.
In my mind’s eye, I witnessed a terrifying future: armies of Robotforce devices communicating in cold digital whispers, learning, evolving, passing knowledge through the network like a virus. “We’re moving towards having supervisory agents that oversee operations,” Isaacs proclaimed proudly, unaware he was describing HUMANITY’S REPLACEMENT.
The walls began to close in. I needed to escape this MADHOUSE.
Outside, in the cool San Francisco air, a moment of clarity struck me like lightning. TrailblazerDX 2025 wasn’t about technology—it was about a FUNDAMENTAL DISCONNECT between corporate vision and human reality. Salesforce executives aboard their AI rocket ship, accelerating toward a horizon their community couldn’t yet see or understand.
A lone figure wearing a faded Golden Hoodie shuffled past me on the sidewalk, muttering about “meaningful deployment errors” and “test frameworks for Flow.”
The gap was real. Undeniable. The company racing toward agent-driven autonomy while its community begged for functionality to make their daily work bearable.
I leaned against a lamppost, scribbling these final thoughts: Salesforce’s AI transformation was inevitable—resistance ultimately futile. The true casualties wouldn’t be jobs but COMMUNITY ITSELF—that inefficient, messy, human collaboration that once defined the ecosystem.
We had traded magic for machinery, Golden Hoodies for CODE REPOSITORIES. This is how the world ends: not with deployment errors, but with autonomous agents.