'Developers Won't Trust Someone Who Can't Build With the Tool,' Says Anaconda's Brian Turcotte

Brian Turcotte is a founding Developer Relations Engineer at Kilo, a company recently acquired by Anaconda. Kilo is an open-source AI coding agent available as extensions for VS Code and JetBrains, a CLI, cloud agents, and code review tools. It supports over 500 models, allowing developers to choose from the latest frontier models and open-weight releases.

Turcotte leads product launches, creates educational content, partners with AI model providers, and hosts community events to engage with Kilo users and the open-source community.

DevRel (Developer Relations) is primarily a marketing function, but as developers are the target audience, DevRel also involves engineering, product, and community engagement. Developers trust DevRel professionals who can build with the promoted tools, making DevRel essential for gaining developer adoption. Balancing the internal and external perspectives can be challenging, as both groups share the same developer mindset.

To stay aligned, DevRel teams closely monitor community and industry trends, quickly adapting to shifting needs.

Kilo's community consists mainly of builders, open-source contributors, side project enthusiasts, and new coders who use AI to learn faster. The community has grown to over 5 million Kilo Coders, 27,000 GitHub stars, 20,000 Discord members, and 100,000 social media followers. Kilo gained popularity by being open-source and model-agnostic, providing tools that many other tools lack.

Turcotte is proud of Kilo's success on Product Hunt, where every launch hit #1 Product of the Day, often reaching #1 of the Week and Month. The success of these launches can be attributed to the coordinated efforts of the DevRel team, including videos, blog posts, social media, partner activation, and community support.