Developer Marketing in the Age of AI
Five years ago, I wrote about how to build a developer brand. The advice was simple: be a great developer, hire great developers, and engage 24/7 with developers using your product. That hasn't changed. What's changed is everything around it.
I asked my friend Matt Palmer, who leads developer relations at Replit, to help me update this post, because he’s great at his job, spends all day, every day talking to developers, and… some pretty big things have happened since 2020.
Today, AI has compressed the landscape. Developers now expect to go from idea to production in hours, not days. And they're vibecoding prototypes through natural language as much as writing traditional code.
So how do you build a developer brand in the age of AI?
What's different
Your audience includes agents now. Developers aren't just reading your docs—their AI assistants are. Your documentation needs to be both human-readable and LLM-friendly. Your API needs to work well with AI workflows. Your error messages need to be parseable by agents making real-time decisions.
The technical spectrum has expanded. AI is blurring the lines between who is and isn't a developer. Weekend builders/996-ers are shipping production apps more frequently than ever with AI assistance. And, your devrel needs empathy for semi-technical builders, not just experienced engineers.
Speed is the new baseline. Tools like Replit, v0, and Claude Code have set new standards—developers can describe what they want in plain English and see working code instantly. If your quickstart takes more than a few minutes, you've already lost. The friction points that used to be acceptable (e.g., confusing docs, opaque error messages, outdated examples) now feel like deal-breakers.
The noise has increased. You can create a demo in a day that used to take a week. Everyone can, and they are. The challenge has shifted from "what can I create?" to "what should I create?" More demo videos, more launch announcements, more noise means you need clearer, more compelling signal.
Community has shifted. From Stack Overflow and Hacker News to real-time Discord, Slack, and Twitter. From forums to AI bots providing first-line support. From static docs to living, AI-parseable resources.
What hasn't changed
Show, don't tell.
Features, not benefits.
Be genuinely helpful.
Be direct.
Remove barriers to getting their hands on the product.
Developers are still skeptical of marketing. They still detest spam. They're still obsessed with precision and accuracy. The mortal sins remain: sharing inaccurate information and slowing them down.
But now they can validate your claims in minutes, not days. They can test multiple tools in parallel. This makes them more discerning, but not less engaged.
The opportunity
When anyone can spin up a demo with AI in an afternoon, taste becomes the moat. Not technical capability, taste.
When technical capabilities converge, why do developers choose one tool over another? Brand becomes a shortcut for discernment. Stripe wasn't just good APIs—it had a point of view about how payments should work.
In an era of AI slop and endless demos, brands with taste become trust signals. They communicate: "We think deeply about what matters. We have standards. We won't waste your time."
The takeaway
AI hasn't eliminated the need for great devrel; it's raised the bar. Developers are more discerning because they can quickly prototype with any tool, so community, trust, and developer experience matter even more. And that starts with the very first touchpoint with your brand: developer marketing.