How to Lead DevRel in the AI Era: Stop Playing It Safe
I’m awake typing this at 5 AM on a Sunday morning, plagued by two issues: the modern operating model for Developer Relations is broken, and I cannot find a comfortable position to sleep in at 36 weeks and 5 days. (The latter is slightly less relevant to this post, but equally present.) Right now, DevRel feels stuck in an existential struggle for impact. Every company has pivoted towards AI, and…
On a chilly Sunday morning, the author found themselves wrestling with two challenges: modernizing the DevRel model and finding time to rest during their final weeks of pregnancy. The modern operating model for Developer Relations, they argue, is broken and mired in an existential struggle for impact. Every company is jumping on the AI bandwagon, following a similar marketing playbook, making it difficult to stand out in a saturated market. Developers, the author's primary customers, are overwhelmed by choices.
Drawing inspiration from GitHub, TBD, and Block, the author shares how they led DevRel during the AI era. At GitHub, they took a patient approach when GitHub Copilot launched, building a talk titled "The Truth About Copilot" to address developer skepticism. This talk became their most in-demand and a popular live workshop, even being distributed by GitHub's CEO.
At TBD, they noticed that most developer education happened within internal channels and started a livestream series on YouTube to bring the tooling to a broader audience. This series helped prove that complex, misunderstood tech wasn't weird or shady. Eventually, the author was promoted to lead Open Source Developer Relations at Block and introduced a vibe coding competition called "The Great Goose Off" to lower the pressure for contestants and make live demos more enjoyable.
Six Ways to Stand Out in the AI Era:
1. Stay hands-on with the product, setting the execution standard for your team by building publicly, shipping code, and maintaining docs.
2. Meet developers where they are in real-time by injecting your product into active ecosystem conversations and turning raw streams into polished content.
3. Move from perfectionism to high-velocity quality, keeping your content technically accurate, easy to follow, and reviewed by a peer. Don't let ideas rot in approval queues.
4. Keep technical meetups hands-on and actionable, creating a reproducible template for AI Agent Hack Nights to build real adoption.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
