Does Workday Developer Agent build orchestrations?

Workday's Developer Guide does not list orchestrations among the things Developer Agent generates, even though the product page for Developer Agent does. The documented way to have AI generate an orchestration is Developer Copilot for Orchestrate, a separate assistant inside Orchestration Builder that only Extend AI customers get.

The product page says Developer Agent builds "custom agents, apps, and orchestrations", and that "one expert agent builds apps, agents, APIs, DevOps, orchestrations, and more." (Read on 4 November 2026.) Plan against the Developer Guide, not the banner.

What the Developer Guide says Developer Agent generates

The Developer Agent overview lists these components:

  • Model business objects.
  • PMD pages for the user interface.
  • PMD scripts, script validations, snippets and functions.
  • WQL queries and Graph queries.

It also builds a whole app or agent app from one prompt, "including creating business objects and security domains", modifies existing apps, validates its own work and generates mock data files. The page of example prompts covers PMD pages, business objects, Graph queries and mutations, and WQL. The only orchestration prompt on it is a question about the difference between synchronous and asynchronous orchestrations, not a request to build one.

For custom agents, Developer Agent has a Custom Agent Creator subagent that can look up deployed Custom Agent Actions and compose them into the .agentskill file. That finds orchestrations that already exist. It does not author them. The Agent app type page points the same way: when an Agent app contains orchestrations, App Builder shows only their names, and Orchestration Builder is where you view the code.

For the difference between the two kinds of agent, see custom agents vs Developer Agent. For what a Custom Agent Action orchestration can call, see Custom Agent Actions that call SOAP, REST and WQL.

What Developer Copilot for Orchestrate does

Click the Developer Copilot button at the top left of Orchestration Builder, check that Edit is selected, and describe the orchestration. Copilot reads the current orchestration, the files you attached and the thread history, plans the change and runs it in up to 10 sequential iterations. The result lands on a non-live copy, marked with a Copilot icon, until you click Accept or Reject.

Workday lists these limits:

  • Who gets it: Extend AI customers, in North America and EMEA (Germany) only. Extend Core does not include Developer Copilot, per the Extend packages comparison.
  • Components it cannot create, configure or connect: Put Amazon Eventbridge Event, Invoke AWS Lambda Function, Get Amazon S3 Object, Store Amazon S3 Object, Send Prism Request, Trigger PDF Generation, Trigger Integration and Create Workday Home Card. It also cannot work with connectors, and cannot paginate non-Workday APIs called with Send HTTP Request.
  • Integration types it does not work with: Journey orchestrations, Workday Studio integrations and EIB integrations.
  • Files: 10 per thread, 250 KB each.
  • Tenant context: none. It cannot connect to a tenant to read custom objects or business processes.
  • Status: Workday calls it experimental and says to review everything it produces.

The connector gap matters most for agent builders. Connectors exist only in Custom Agent Action orchestrations, so any step that calls a service such as Salesforce or Jira through a connector is one you place by hand. The docs separately describe Copilot knowledge connectors, which let Copilot read documents from sources such as Jira or Google Drive; those feed Copilot context and do not add connector steps.

A working split between the two assistants

This division follows the documentation; Workday does not prescribe it.

  1. Build the app or agent app with Developer Agent: business objects, pages, scripts, WQL, and the .agent and .agentskill files.
  2. Build each orchestration in Orchestration Builder with Copilot, one change at a time. Several unaccepted Copilot changes merge into one change that you can only accept or reject as a whole, rejection cannot be undone, and any edit you make by hand while a change is pending counts as part of it.
  3. Switch to Ask mode for questions. Workday warns that a general question in Edit mode can still change the orchestration.
  4. Deploy the orchestration, then let Developer Agent look it up when it composes the skill file. See the Developer Agent review checklist for checking what it produces, and Who gets Developer Agent and what it uses in Flex Credits for access.

Specific prompts work better. Workday's own example replaces "add error handling" with "add a global error handler that logs the error message and returns a 500 status with error details". When Copilot keeps misreading a request, attach a schema or API spec or split the request into smaller steps.

Building orchestrations without Developer Copilot

Without Extend AI there is no documented AI generation of orchestrations, so you place the steps by hand in Orchestration Builder. Start with turning on Orchestrate for Integrations.

kiweely writes an orchestration into the app source with the rest of the app, validates and deploys it to the tenant, and reads the result back from a real run.

Whoever builds it, prove it the same way: run it with real inputs, open the run in Orchestration Activity to check its status, and read the target record back. A generated orchestration that validates has not yet been shown to work.