Dreamforce 2026: What Salesforce Developers Must Do Now

Dreamforce 2026 opens in three days. If you build on Salesforce, three things shifted this summer that make Tuesday different from every Dreamforce before it: MCP is now generally available, Headless 360 just entered open beta, and your Developer Edition already has free access to both. The window to set this up before the keynote announcements land is now.

What Actually Changed This Summer

Salesforce’s Hosted MCP Servers went generally available in April. Since then, every Developer Edition org has shipped with three things free: Agentforce Vibes IDE (a browser-based VS Code that launches from Setup), Claude Sonnet 4.5 as the default coding model, and the MCP servers themselves. No additional license, no purchase order. You already have it.

In July, Salesforce added Headless 360 to the mix — currently in open beta. This is the piece worth understanding before the keynotes, because it is the most architecturally significant change to the Salesforce developer surface in years.

Headless 360: Four Tools, All of Salesforce

Headless 360 is a single MCP server that exposes everything Salesforce does through exactly four tools: Discover, Describe, Dispatch, and Dispatch Read Only. No 200-endpoint REST sprawl. No custom Apex integration code. An AI agent connects to your org, tells Discover what it wants in plain language, gets a ranked list of matching skills from a semantic search index, reads the technical contract via Describe, and executes via Dispatch — all while your existing permission sets, field-level security, and sharing rules apply.

The design is deliberate. Loading dozens of tool definitions into an LLM’s context window is a known failure mode: the model starts picking the wrong tool, manufacturing arguments, and losing track of the task. Headless 360’s four-tool façade keeps the agent’s surface small and stable while the skill library behind it grows to thousands of operations. The Headless 360 beta announcement covers the architecture in detail.

Salesforce reports Agentforce Vibes usage has surged 22x since last Dreamforce. Expect the Headless 360 skill library expansion and a likely GA announcement to headline Tuesday’s developer keynote.

Set This Up Before Tuesday

The activation path is straightforward but involves four sequential steps that each take a few minutes:

1. Activate the server: Setup → Quick Find → "MCP Servers" → toggle on Headless 360. Wait up to two minutes before the server is live.
2. Create an External Client App: Setup → External Client App Manager → New. Enable OAuth, enter your client’s callback URL. For Claude: https://claude.ai/api/mcp/auth_callback. For Cursor: http://localhost:8787/callback. Retrieve your Consumer Key and Secret — Salesforce emails a verification code.
3. Set OAuth scopes: Add mcp_api and refresh_token, offline_access.
4. Connect your client: Open Claude, Cursor, or ChatGPT’s MCP settings, point it at your org’s MCP endpoint using the credentials from step two, and authorize via OAuth.

Salesforce has a step-by-step guide specifically for connecting Claude that covers the edge cases. The official Dreamforce 2026 developer guide lists the full session schedule and Headless 360 Theater details.

What to Watch at the Event

Dreamforce runs six repeating 20-minute Headless 360 Theater sessions throughout the day — no registration required. The developer keynote led by Christophe Coenraets is where platform announcements will land. Watch for Headless 360 GA status, the Data 360 and Slackbot MCP servers, and the 100+ Agent Skills library expansion. Agentforce 360’s Agent Script and Intelligent Context are already GA — expect demos there, not new announcements.

One Caveat Before You Start

The Headless 360 documentation makes a point easy to skip: do not enable every available MCP tool at once. The practical ceiling for tools in a single LLM context is around 20. Past that, performance degrades — wrong tool selection, hallucinated arguments, task drift. Use toolsets selectively. The semantic Discover layer is there so the agent can find the right skill without you loading everything upfront. The architecture is clever; abuse it and you are back to prompt chaos.

Headless 360 is still in beta with a growing skill library and a GA announcement in flight. That said, the four-tool design is already functional enough to replace most bespoke MCP setups developers have been cobbling together. Set it up now, test against real org data before Tuesday, and walk into Dreamforce with context instead of slides.