The Developer's Journey: Tactics in the Age of AI

Content is now cheap. Your competitors can produce credible-seeming blog posts, documentation, and sample code at near-zero marginal cost. Maybe the AI-generated tutorial videos are still a little scary, but what happens when they’re not? If your DevRel strategy is “publish more stuff,” you’re about to be in trouble.

This is the most important thing I’ve learned thinking through how AI changes the work of Developer Relations: the fundamentals don’t change, but AI turns the volume up on what already mattered most. Every stage of the Developer’s Journey—Discover, Understand, Play, Build, Advocate—gets new AI-native tactics layered on top of the traditional ones. Most of them involve feeding the models. The developers in your community now use AI as a mentor, a researcher, a prototyper, and a coding partner, and you need to be at the top of that AI’s list of recommendations, and make sure the model is generating code your way. Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), which is essentially SEO for the AI era, minus the 20 years of best practices and actual knowledge of how it works, is now a real discipline DevRel teams have to engage with.

Perhaps the most counterintuitive shift is at the Advocacy stage. Your community members who have moved beyond building and into genuine, independent advocacy have always been your most credible voices. AI makes them more important, not less. When anyone can prompt out a blog post or a tutorial video without a human subject ever stepping in front of a camera, the trust between developers and the people who speak for your technology becomes the only real differentiator. Your community advocates are free from the accusation that they’re merely speaking for the company. That independence has always been valuable. Now it’s irreplaceable.

Full post on my site: Developer Journey Tactics in the Age of AI.