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Salesforce developers Apex with AI

AI Apex generation is real, useful, and full of footguns. This page is the practitioner guide to using AI for Apex without producing the kind of code that breaks production in week 4. Patterns that work, patterns that don't, and the review discipline that makes the difference.

04 steps · 04 FAQs

AI hits 90% test coverage easily. The assertions test nothing. The build is green. The bug ships.

Practical steps

How to actually do this.

  1. 01

    Specify constraints in the prompt

    Bulk-safe, governor-limit-aware, error-handled, logging-instrumented. State each constraint. AI follows what you say, not what you mean.

  2. 02

    Review at the pattern level

    Don't read line-by-line. Ask: is the SOQL bulkified? Is the DML batched? Is the error path explicit? If those three are right, the rest is detail.

  3. 03

    Write assertions before tests

    Define what 'correct' means for the business case, in English. Then ask AI to write a test that proves it. Order matters.

  4. 04

    Run static analysis

    PMD or CodeScan catch the patterns AI misses (security, governor-limit anti-patterns, dead code). Free. Run it on every PR.

Frequently asked

Common questions on Apex with AI.

Can AI write production-ready Apex?

For greenfield triggers, handlers, and service classes following standard patterns: yes, with review. For complex business logic spanning multiple objects with shared state: not yet. The bar isn't 'can it write code' but 'can a human review it faster than they could write it.' The answer is increasingly yes.

What's the biggest risk of AI-generated Apex?

Plausible-looking code that violates a governor limit at scale. AI optimises for code that compiles and passes tests; it doesn't natively reason about CPU time, query rows, or DML statement counts. Reviewers have to look for those specifically.

How do I prompt AI for bulk-safe Apex?

State the constraint explicitly: 'Generate a bulk-safe trigger handler that processes up to 200 records per transaction, executes a single SOQL with related-record traversal, and DMLs results in a single statement.' AI will follow stated constraints; it ignores implied ones.

Should I let AI write my test classes?

Yes for the boilerplate (setup, DML, mock data). No for the assertions, write those by hand against the business logic you actually want to verify. AI test classes look good and prove nothing if the asserts are trivial.

Getting Started

Skip the reading. Ship the Apex with AI.

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