A couple years ago, everyone was asking if DevRel was dead. I’m sure you heard it too… the think pieces, the LinkedIn hot takes, the “is this role even necessary?” conversations.

Well, plot twist: we’re not dead. We’re standing on the biggest stage of our careers.

Developer Relations is leading one of the most important shifts in tech right now, and we’re doing it with the same skills we’ve always had.

The Pivot I Didn’t See Coming

I built a DevRel dream team. We were crushing it! We were everywhere, doing all the things, living our best DevRel lives. Then reality hit. Our product, the one we’d spent three years building and promoting and loving, got sunset.

That hurt. We’d given everything to make it successful. And when it was gone, I couldn’t help but wonder what happens to us now?

But instead of letting us go, leadership asked us to pivot to something completely different. They wanted us to work on goose, an AI agent. We were very grateful to still have jobs, but there was one small problem:

We didn’t know anything about AI agents.

Our whole job had just changed, and we were supposed to teach something we didn’t understand ourselves.

The Moment Everything Clicked

After my initial panic subsided, I had a realization: nobody knows this stuff. It’s not just us. The entire developer ecosystem is learning in realtime. Someone has to teach the masses about AI driven development.

Why not us?

That’s when I understood why they kept our team around. We have exactly the skills needed for a moment like this. A moment where no one has all the answers, but someone needs to figure it out and bring everyone else along for the ride.

Going first. Figuring stuff out. Guiding others. That’s literally what we do in DevRel.

I know there’s a lot of AI hype out there. I know it feels noisy and sometimes like a fad. But we all know with the big mandate for engineers to adopt AI, it isn’t going anywhere any time soon. I don’t want my fellow developer advocates to get left behind, especially when developers are looking to us to lead the way (even if they’d never admit it lol).

The good news is that it’s still early, and you already have everything you need to succeed here.

Be Honest

The first thing we did was get real with our community. Five minutes ago we were talking about payment protocols, and suddenly we’re all over your feed talking about AI. That could look a bit suspicious lol.

We had to make sure people didn’t confuse us with the grifters promising AI pipe dreams they can’t deliver. So we were honest:

“Look, I don’t know AI. But I know I need to learn it quickly, and so do you. I’ve helped you keep up with the never ending JavaScript frameworks. I was there when everything had to move to the cloud overnight. I was there when containers became the only way to ship software. And I’m here now to help you again.”

We didn’t position ourselves as AI experts. We positioned ourselves as people learning alongside the community, sharing our discoveries as we go.

This vulnerability doesn’t mean showing up without confidence. It means showing up confident that we can figure it out together. And that approachability is a DevRel superpower we’ve always had.

My team gets questions constantly in Discord, on social media, at events. Half the time we have to say, “Hmm, I don’t know either. Let’s figure it out together.” And you know what? That creates the best learning opportunities. People bring us their real use cases, we work through them in public, and others feel safe jumping in to help.

The goose community has become one of the most welcoming spaces out there. Community members tell us this all the time. In an industry where everyone’s posing as an expert, being vulnerable and honest stands out. It builds trust.

Actually Use the Thing

Being vulnerable is great, but we also need to deliver value. Here’s how we got up to speed fast: we use AI ourselves. Constantly.

You can’t relate to your developer audience if you’ve never walked in their shoes. So we stay one step ahead by building with AI every single day.

We use it to vibe code products and demo apps. We use it to understand unfamiliar codebases when community members ask for help. We use it to review new features of our own product. We even use it to draft documentation, which we then edit with the human touch.

We use AI in CI/CD pipelines, to set up environments (one of my favorite use cases), to manage GitHub projects and triage our messy backlog, to analyze community feedback and spot patterns we can share with product and engineering teams.

While everyone else is trying to wow developers with flashy demos they don’t need, we focus on day-to-day engineering tasks and show how AI can handle tedious work so developers can be more efficient.

And guess what? This practical content performs way better than any extravagant demo we’ve ever done. People are hungry for real use cases that actually help them be better developers.

The Trust Factor: Show the Mess

Here’s something developers won’t tell you but I will: they don’t trust your shiny demos. They don’t believe you one-shot a complete application in 30 seconds. They want to see the full, messy, real process.

So we do livestreams where we build with the community. We don’t hide the failures. AI is nondeterministic. People need to know this!!! They need to see how to iterate when things go wrong, how to recover when AI fails, how to protect their code from getting totally messed up.

If we keep all the messy parts in the background while editing our videos, we’re robbing them of critical learning.

Authenticity beats perfection. We’ve always known this. We’ve always built in public, shown our missteps, earned trust by being real. AI just makes this even more important.

How Developers Will Find You Now (Spoiler: Not Google)

Let’s talk about distribution, because it’s changing fast.

Developers aren’t using Google and Stack Overflow like they used to. They’re going straight to ChatGPT and similar tools for quick, contextual answers. This means how they discover your content is fundamentally different.

SEO is basically dead (sorry). I can’t remember the last time I searched for something and saw a developer blog in the results. Social media is a mess. You have 100,000+ followers and yet only two likes on your post because the algorithm won’t show it to anyone.

But high quality, authentic content still matters. Maybe more than ever.

New models are being trained constantly, and they’ve already consumed the entire existing web. They’re hungry for fresh content. With realtime search capabilities the bots will gladly point people to your content, even if your favorite social media platform refuses to.

I use ChatGPT now to find blog posts from developers on specific topics. I watch videos right in my ChatGPT sessions. This is how people will find your content going forward.

What this means for DevRel leaders is that we need to adjust our expectations about engagement metrics. Views and clicks will decline. But that doesn’t mean the content isn’t impactful. Check your referrers and you’ll see ChatGPT is bringing you your future community members.

We already know how to measure success beyond vanity metrics. Community health, trust, and influence have always been at the heart of our work. That hasn’t changed.

The Stage Got Even Bigger

AI enables everyone to become builders, not just developers.

All 12,000 employees at my company now have access to goose. While it was designed for developers, other teams started using it too. Turns out, being able to speak in natural language and build a prototype or internal tool is pretty appealing to everyone… go figure lol.

But they needed help learning too – prompting techniques, understanding LLMs, using MCP to connect AI to their daily tools.

Guess who our CEO asked to lead this? DevRel.

That’s when I realized how big our stage really was. It wasn’t just about developers anymore. The entire company was looking to us to help them step into this new era.

So overnight, we started teaching everyone – legal, marketing, design, research, executive assistants. We ran weekly enablement sessions, traveled to team offsites, adjusted our messaging to focus less on code and more on outcomes.

We learned about their use cases. We provided customized guidance. We treated them like any other community of builders. Nurturing them, creating safe spaces for questions, highlighting their wins.

These early wins created massive momentum for company-wide adoption. My team gets kudos messages every week from people saying, “Thank you. You changed the way I work.”

We became central to the company’s AI journey, not just as teachers, but as cultural guides. Our work set the tone for how people feel about change. We help them move from fear to curiosity.

This is bigger than any product we could have been part of.

Your Stage Is Bigger Too

Whatever you’re teaching developers about AI extends beyond your product. Developers need help learning how to work with AI in general.

Every blog post you write, every workshop you teach, every talk you give is helping developers adapt to the biggest change in software development in decades.

Whether you realize it or not, you’re shaping how developers feel about AI. You’re helping them understand what’s real and what’s hype. You’re showing them where to focus and how their existing skills translate.

Even when you’re just writing docs or examples, you’re writing the playbook for how people will interact with these tools. You’re modeling ethical AI use. You’re defining the culture of AI adoption.

Developers will carry what you teach them into other jobs and companies. The trust you build today extends beyond this moment. You’re helping an entire industry level up.

Don’t underestimate your influence. What you say will ripple through companies and communities you’ll never see, but they’ll feel it.

What’s Coming Next

AI is moving fast, and so are community needs. Right now, the space is flooded with demo apps. Soon, developers will need help translating cute demos into real production work. They’ll need guidance on integrating AI into team projects, building automated workflows, and honestly, dealing with the fear that AI might take their jobs.

Start thinking beyond the initial wow factor and start exploring real developer use cases. Go beyond the indie developer task and think about how to use these AI tools in team workflows within big enterprise monorepos.

These are the lessons developers are going to need, and we can to help with that.

So if you’re still wondering whether DevRel is dead, stop wondering. Roll up your sleeves, start learning, and get ready to lead. Because developers are looking to us to show them the way forward.

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This post is based on my talk at the Developer Relations Conference. Watch the full presentation here.