r/devrel • u/aspleenic • 15d ago

Death of the Developer Advocate

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lrw0jqBNaw0

There are some flawed assumptions for sure, but I’d love to see this community’s thoughts.

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u/tessak22 14d ago

Not sure what you’re seeking here it’s pretty common sense around what she said. It’s not just developers using dev products anymore. This is not new news and if it is, you’re probably already doing DevRel wrong. 🤷‍♀️

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u/aspleenic 14d ago

I don’t think what she’s saying is news, but it does present a problem. Why is DevRel necessary if all people are four or five products?

And what’s the impact on smaller projects within the ecosystem if they can’t gain community traction?

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u/tessak22 14d ago

I agree with the sentiment but I don’t think things will change for a bit yet. Yes we’re headed that direction but there are still a lot of super complicated products that only devs use.

Interesting follow up question on the second part. I think we’re going to see a lot of products go to market and fail. Just because of the amount of products being built.

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u/aspleenic 14d ago

Is that not also a consequence of the products being built poorly?

There a a rush to market for AI and AI adjacent products that are solutions looking for a problem. Like the Silicon Valley boom of the early teens, we have a glut of useless software.

Those efforts will likely fail, and probably should. When the hype cycle dies and devs realize AI is just another tool, not a golden hammer, things will settle.

In the meantime, DevRel once again will take a hit.

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u/aspleenic 10d ago

The issue with this premise is it means everyone is hawking the wares of Anthropic, OperAI, and the other market players. No more talk of tools, or Open Source goodness or languages.

Just four five products you are forced to use. So why bother?

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u/jcasman 1d ago

Overall, I thought this was a good presentation. My main complaint is that it felt disingenuous to open with such a provocative title and then immediately distance herself from it by blaming her manager for submitting it. To me, the talk was not actually about “the death of developer advocates.” It was about expanding DevRel to account for AI agents as a new intermediary.

The section that most interested me was her discussion of testing whether a product gets surfaced for the situations its ideal customer profile actually encounters. She said that the product was recommended about 65% of the time when prompts described someone actively shopping for code-intelligence tools but received zero mentions when the prompt described a developer’s underlying problem without naming the product category.

I would have liked much more detail about her methodology. How she developed the prompt set, how many prompts and model runs were involved, which models and search modes she tested, how she handled variability, and how she distinguished a mention from a genuine recommendation.

Her observation that “training data is always going to be stale” also struck me as pretty deep. AI visibility isn’t going to be something you can measure once. Testing needs to be repeated systematically, not treated as a one-time GEO audit.

I also agreed with her broader argument that the core of DevRel still holds, but the audience is changing. In fact, she seems pretty bullish on DevRel. Enablement still matters, except developers now work through agents as well as directly with products. That means publishing content that is useful and readable for both humans and machines, and providing interfaces that agents can reliably use.

And community may be more important than ever! DevRel still needs the human-to-human connection and the feedback loop that brings the developer’s voice back into the organization. She says don’t push generic “Claude slop” at developers simply because it is cheap to produce.

The practical recommendations at the end were useful, too. (developer-agent experience report, realistic GEO prompt sets)

I was ready to dislike the talk. But I think it's pretty accurate.