Content Is Code - Matt Palmer, Conductor

AI Engineer · 10 min · 128 sentences · from YouTube's caption track

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1. 00:00So, if you've ever created content, you know it could be hard.
2. 00:03And what's often most hard is choosing a medium for how you'd like to communicate.
3. 00:07Do you write a blog post?
4. 00:09Do you create a video?
5. 00:10Do you go out and speak at a conference?
6. 00:12And even of these things, you're likely to select something that you're good at or you have experience doing.
7. 00:17But the idea I want to present to you today is that increasingly code is becoming the way that we communicate.
8. 00:22Now, this might seem obvious in 2026, but I want to point out that even a couple years ago, this was wild because the only people that were writing code to create content were professional software engineers.
9. 00:34And often professional software engineers are spending their time doing mostly engineering and are not getting that deep on content.
10. 00:41Now, what do I mean when I say content?
11. 00:44Well, I'm talking mostly about technical communication.
12. 00:46That could be documentation, it could be things like change logs, emails, product marketing, it could be video, which I create a lot of.
13. 00:54Um, and it could be other things associated with a typical DevRel motion, but it's not restricted to DevRel, right?
14. 00:59Content or technical communication is the act of communicating what a what problem a product really solves.
15. 01:06And that can be done by anybody.
16. 01:08That might mean really complete, accurate documentation that covers every part of the Deta X this framework.
17. 01:14It could be change logs shipped timely um with robust assets that cover all areas of a product.
18. 01:21This is something that's often overlooked.
19. 01:22This is actually really hard because to have an accurate change log, you have to have an accurate diff of your product.
20. 01:28Or you could just have someone that spends a lot of their time combing through PRs to try to figure out what was shipped.
21. 01:35It could be things like timely product updates, emails, which kind of follow from a change log, right?
22. 01:40If you understand what changed, you can then summarize that over time for your users.
23. 01:46It could be something as simple as a home page product tour instead of a static screenshot.
24. 01:53These are all ways that we're communicating products, we're communicating what this thing does or how it's changed via either written content free via code via distinct assets.
25. 02:09It could also be something like video overlays, right?
26. 02:12Something like adding a bit of engaging material to the content that you create, but increasingly where I think this is headed is entire product surfaces and entire videos generated
27. 02:25via code.
28. 02:26And in front of me, I have a product tour for Conductor that was built entirely with React and Remotion.
29. 02:33So, basically, I recreated the product surface.
30. 02:35I used a Remotion scene to recreate the product and do a full walk-through of a sample user flow.
31. 02:43Now, it's not perfect.
32. 02:44It's a little buggy and the flows aren't quite there yet, if I'm being honest, but I think we're moving towards a world where this is normal.
33. 02:52So, my name is Matt.
34. 02:53I was previously a data engineer, then I led DevRel at Replit, and now I lead developer experience at Conductor.
35. 03:00And today I want to talk about how content is shifting left to code as the source of truth.
36. 03:06And so, I think there are three distinct eras we can think about here.
37. 03:10Era one, the handcrafted era of content.
38. 03:13Era two, an era where code existed, but it was quite expensive.
39. 03:17And era three, where code exists, but it's very cheap.
40. 03:21And that's where we are today with AI.
41. 03:23So, in the handcrafted era, right?
42. 03:26Everything is manual.
43. 03:27The only levers we really have are time and money and skill.
44. 03:31And so, if I want something, I either need to create it myself, but there are only 24 hours in a day, so likely I'm going to go out and seek an expert,
45. 03:38someone that does know how to create this thing.
46. 03:40Maybe that's an agency or someone who creates these assets professionally.
47. 03:44If I'm thinking about like motion graphics, for example.
48. 03:47Now, post era one, when we had expensive code, code and cloud are mature assets.
49. 03:55These are things that have existed for a while, and most professional software engineers know how to use.
50. 04:01Engineering is now the bottleneck.
51. 04:02This is like Serp era, everybody's paying a lot for engineers, and to get anything done, you really need professional software engineers.
52. 04:11So, you'd better pay someone, maybe not an agency, but an engineer.
53. 04:14And that included things like, you know, um robust documentation, or even just a website, right?
54. 04:19You Back in the day, it's hard to imagine before AI, you wanted a website, a good website, you needed a front-end engineer, or like a low-code website service, but those weren't any good to begin with.
55. 04:30So, you needed a professional engineer to have a really nice website.
56. 04:34And what that meant was that content is really not the priority, right?
57. 04:38Because if you're a professional engineer, you have better ways of spending your time.
58. 04:41And I think this is reflected by um libraries like Remotion, frameworks like Remotion, um not proliferating the way that they are today.
59. 04:51Because, really, who has the time and energy to put into these things?
60. 04:54There aren't a ton of what I'd call content engineers.
61. 04:57Now, in era three, most of these things, you're not paying a human, you're paying Anthropic, or OpenAI, or whoever, right?
62. 05:05You can create videos with Claude.
63. 05:07You can create documentation with Claude.
64. 05:09You can design websites with Claude, and you can create motion graphics with Claude.
65. 05:12Now, the problem is that not all of the all of these things are good, right?
66. 05:16We'll talk about that later, but if you know what you're doing, if you have an engineering mindset, if you understand the systems, you can create high-quality assets with these systems.
67. 05:24And I'm going to talk about how to do that in the rest of this presentation.
68. 05:28So, today, code is cheap.
69. 05:31And we talk about code as communication.
70. 05:34So, code is communication.
71. 05:36The fastest way to build an asset today is through code.
72. 05:40And it's not just to build software, right?
73. 05:44It's really to build anything.
74. 05:46If I want a prototype a video, a website, slides, um I mean really any asset, any creative thing that I can think of, images, video, the fastest way to do that is going to be through code or code generation.
75. 06:00And I was thinking about this presentation, I was thinking about how I was going to create all the assets for this presentation, and I realized that my favorite medium
76. 06:09is actually TypeScript.
77. 06:10Aside from recording myself talk or writing, every ancillary asset is React or TypeScript.
78. 06:17And I just want to take a moment because that is the most insane statement to hear myself say if I was thinking about this two or three years ago, right?
79. 06:26I don't even really know how to write that good of TypeScript, you know?
80. 06:30My background's in data engineering, I come from Python land.
81. 06:33Well, I better learn TypeScript, I better learn React because the best way for me to get these high-fidelity assets is React, TypeScript, CSS, um and HTML.
82. 06:43And that's wild.
83. 06:44That's wild to say.
84. 06:46So, if code is inexpensive, what is the expensive thing?
85. 06:50Now, you might think I'm going to say taste here.
86. 06:51I'm not going to say taste because everybody says taste.
87. 06:53Structure is expensive.
88. 06:56This is maybe a bit of a contrarian sta- statement here because the hard thing is maintaining a very structured code base, maintaining brand guidelines and keeping those guidelines consistent,
89. 07:07keeping design tokens in your project, separating even front-end code from back-end code from these design tokens.
90. 07:15Merging really clean PRs, which like nobody does, right?
91. 07:17Tagging PRs, PR descriptions, knowing what's a feature and what's a bug fix, knowing if you reverted a PR.
92. 07:24How many organizations do this?
93. 07:25I've worked at a number of organizations, none, right?
94. 07:29And maintaining accurate internal documentation so that anybody can accomplish anything.
95. 07:34Even if you have really good agents, they're not going to know how to solve these problems if they don't have documentation or skills, right?
96. 07:40And so, structure often is the difference between AI purple gradient slop, right?
97. 07:47And something that looks professional and polished.
98. 07:50And I would even go a little bit further, and I would say that this is conscientiousness.
99. 07:55And the dictionary definition for conscientiousness is the quality of being meticulous, careful, and guided by a strong sense of moral or professional duty.
100. 08:04And so, it's less about comp- like software engineering skill today.
101. 08:09It's less about the skill of being able to create this these assets, and more about the meticulousness and care given to making sure that an outcome matches your expectations.
102. 08:23And that, you know, increasingly with each model generation is not predicated on being the smartest person in the room, or being this the person in the room with the most technical skill.
103. 08:34So, what does AI reward?
104. 08:38AI rewards conscientiousness.
105. 08:40AI rewards organizational excellence.
106. 08:43AI rewards structure.
107. 08:45And ultimately, these are the things that go into good AI skills.
108. 08:50There's a lot of like not very good AI skills out there.
109. 08:54Um and most of them are just generated without any regard for what's in their contents or how they're structured.
110. 09:01And so, all the assets that I showed you at the beginning of this video are a byproduct of design tokens, structured code, um structured assets.
111. 09:10And they get exponentially harder to create when we lack those things.
112. 09:16And so, code, again, is communication.
113. 09:19And we're seeing a shift left movement for content, where content is moving to code.
114. 09:25And if code, right, is the source of truth, if our code base is the source of truth, we have to have a structured source of truth in order to create content
115. 09:35from code.
116. 09:36In order to communicate, we need structure and conscientiousness around the way that we create code.
117. 09:44And again, this only works with organizational excellence.
118. 09:49And so, I think what we'll see in 2026 and the years beyond is that the highest performing the best communicating teams are the ones that are able to instill discipline
119. 10:01and rigor into the process of creating software and then shift their content left towards the code through content engineering.
120. 10:12And so, 2026, I think was the year of the creative technologist, at least in the DevRel space.
121. 10:17This is the term that got thrown around a lot.
122. 10:20I think 2027 is the year of the content engineer.
123. 10:24And I'll close on that because I think what we're going to see next year are declarative and robust content pipelines capable of producing content walkthroughs, capable of producing documentation,
124. 10:36screenshots, product updates, all of the things that were really manual can now be created through code, through React, and ultimately because of AI.
125. 10:47Again, I'm Matt with Conductor.
126. 10:49Thanks for sticking around for my talk.
127. 10:51I'll catch you next time.
128. 10:52Peace.