Workday made Developer Agent generally available at Workday Rising on October 13, 2026, as part of Workday Extend AI. Workday calls it its "agentic-first development companion": you describe the outcome you want in plain language, and it builds custom agents, apps and orchestrations on Workday. Workday reports that more than 125 early access customers and partners used it to build over 6,000 custom apps and agents, with standard coding tasks completed 12 to 40 times faster.

This post covers what it does, where it runs, what you need before you start and how to approach a first build.

What Developer Agent builds

According to Workday's product page, Developer Agent:

  • selects the right Workday tools and APIs, writes the code and "wires everything together";
  • builds custom agents in the open AgentSkills format;
  • builds custom apps and pages, scaffolding the app around the APIs it finds;
  • builds Workday Extend objects behind React apps, serverless functions and cross-system orchestrations;
  • can extend Workday with new business objects and business processes when the job requires them.

What sets it apart from a general coding assistant is Workday knowledge. Workday points out that generic coding tools do not know Workday's data model or business processes; Developer Agent brings Workday's tools, APIs, documentation and patterns into the session as you work.

Where it runs

Developer Agent is available on the Workday Developer Site or inside the coding tools developers already use. Workday's product page names Claude Code, VS Code, Cursor and Google Antigravity, and the launch announcement also mentions Codex. It connects to those tools through MCP, the open standard for giving AI tools access to external capabilities.

The practical consequence: you keep the editor, model and habits you already have, and Developer Agent adds Workday's knowledge and tools to them.

What you need first

  • Workday Extend Professional. Workday says Developer Agent is available through Extend Professional, and to contact your account team for access.
  • A Workday Developer Site account and a development tenant. For client work, that is the customer's company account. For learning, Workday now offers personal developer accounts with a personal Development tenant, in beta; see setting up a personal developer account.
  • A Flex Credits arrangement. Workday lists Developer Agent among the capabilities priced in Flex Credits.

Workday also states that developer data is kept out of model training and that inference runs within your Extend region, which matters for client data residency commitments.

A first build, step by step

  1. Start with a small, real outcome. "A page where a manager sees pending equipment requests for their team and can mark one fulfilled" is better than "an asset management app."
  2. Describe the outcome, the users and the data. Say who uses it, what they see and what they can change. Name existing Workday objects if you know them.
  3. Let it plan before it writes. Ask for the plan first: which business objects, pages and orchestrations it intends to create. A plan is easier to correct than code.
  4. Review what it produces. Generated output still needs a human to check security, data model changes and naming before deployment. Use the Developer Agent review checklist.
  5. Deploy to Development and test as real users. Every agent built with Developer Agent is registered automatically in the Agent System of Record. Test as the people who will use it, including someone who should see less.

Where a human still decides

Developer Agent speeds up building. It does not remove the decisions that belong to the people accountable for the tenant:

  • whether a new business object is the right model, given that data model changes are hard to undo;
  • whether the security domains used are the narrowest that work;
  • whether an agent's actions need human approval before they run;
  • when something is ready to promote beyond Development.

Developer Agent and kiweely

Developer Agent is designed for developers working in coding tools. kiweely is designed for the Workday consultant who is not a developer: a desktop app where you describe what you need in a conversation, and an AI agent (Claude or ChatGPT, on your own account) designs, validates and deploys a Workday Extend app to the client's Development environment, then tests it in the browser. kiweely reads the actual tenant before it proposes anything, asks for your consent before each change and keeps each client's tenants in a separate connection.

The two fit together. A developer on the team can work in Cursor with Developer Agent while a functional consultant builds and tests in kiweely against the same Development tenant. See custom agents vs. developer agents for how the roles divide.