Talking Drupal #538 - Agentic Development Workflows

Today we are talking about Development Workflows, Agentic Agents, and how they work together with guests Andy Giles & Matt Glaman. We'll also cover Drupal Canvas CLI as our module of the week.

For show notes visit:
https://www.talkingDrupal.com/538

Topics

• Understanding Agentic Development Workflows
• Understanding UID Generation in AI Agents
• Exploring Generative AI and Traditional Programming
• Building Canvas Pages with AI Agents
• Using Writing Tools and APIs for Automation
• Introduction to MCP Server and Its Tools
• Agent to Agent Orchestration and External Tools
• Command Line Tools for Agent Coding
• Security and Privacy Concerns with AI Tools
• The Future of AI Tools and Their Sustainability
• Benefits of AI for Site Builders

Resources

• Decoupled frontend with Drupal Canvas
• AI workflows will reshape development organizations – mglaman.dev
• Agents.md
• AI is here to stay
• Autocomplete training 38:09 Code completion
• MCP
• Open Code
• Geerlingguy ai voice

Guests

Matt Glaman - mglaman.dev mglaman

Hosts

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan
John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi
Andy Giles - dripyard.com andyg5000

MOTW Correspondent

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu

• Brief description:
  • Have you ever wanted to sync components from a site using Drupal Canvas out to another project like a headless front end, or conversely, from an outside repo into Drupal Canvas? There's an NPM library for that
• Module name/project name:
  • Drupal Canvas CLI
• Brief history
  • How old: created in July 2025 (as xb-cli originally) by Bálint Kléri (balintbrews) of Acquia
  • Versions available: 0.6.2, and really only useful with Drupal Canvas, which works with Drupal core 11.2
• Maintainership
  • Actively maintained
  • Number of open issues: 8 open issues, 2 of which are bugs, but one of which was marked fixed in the past week
• Usage stats:
  • 128 weekly downloads according to npmjs.com
• Module features and usage
  • With the Drupal Canvas CLI installed, you'll have a command line tool that allows you to download (export) components from Canvas into your local filesystem. There are options to download just the components, just the global css, or everything, and more. If no flags are provided, the tool will interactively prompt you for which options you want to use.
  • There is also an upload command with a similar set of options. It's worth noting that the upload will also automatically run the build and validate commands, ensuring that the uploaded components will work smoothly with Drupal Canvas
  • I thought this would be relevant to our topic today because with this tool you can create a React component with the aid of the AI integration available for Canvas and then sync that, either to a headless front end built in something like Next.js or Astro or a tool like Storybook; or you could use an AI-enhanced tool like Cursor IDE to build a component locally and then sync that into a Drupal site using Canvas
  • There is a blog post Balint published that includes a demo, if you want to see this tool in action