The New Agentforce Metadata and Development Lifecycle

Salesforce's new Agentforce Builder (GA Spring '26) introduces a revamped metadata model centered on bundleized assets. The key change is the introduction of AiAuthoringBundle, which stores human-readable .agent script files, and an updated GenAiPlannerBundle that co-locates all version-specific runtime assets in one directory. This eliminates 'global ripples' where editing a shared subagent would affect all agents using it. The lifecycle separates authoring (draft .agent files) from execution (Bot and GenAiPlannerBundle metadata generated at commit time). For CI/CD, teams can deploy just the AiAuthoringBundle and trigger a publish command, or deploy both bundles simultaneously for a fully automated pipeline. Human-readable script files also simplify pull request reviews compared to the old scattered XML approach.