WEBVTT NOTE Sentence-level transcript of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yv6xovSsB1U NOTE One cue per sentence. Cue ids are the line anchors on /transcripts/yv6xovSsB1U.html. A cue ends where the next begins, or 2 s after its last word. s1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:03.080 So, if you've ever created content, you know it could be hard. s2 00:00:03.080 --> 00:00:07.920 And what's often most hard is choosing a medium for how you'd like to communicate. s3 00:00:07.920 --> 00:00:09.200 Do you write a blog post? s4 00:00:09.200 --> 00:00:10.400 Do you create a video? s5 00:00:10.400 --> 00:00:12.600 Do you go out and speak at a conference? s6 00:00:12.600 --> 00:00:17.080 And even of these things, you're likely to select something that you're good at or you have experience doing. s7 00:00:17.080 --> 00:00:22.600 But the idea I want to present to you today is that increasingly code is becoming the way that we communicate. s8 00:00:22.600 --> 00:00:34.520 Now, 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. s9 00:00:34.520 --> 00:00:41.480 And often professional software engineers are spending their time doing mostly engineering and are not getting that deep on content. s10 00:00:41.480 --> 00:00:44.320 Now, what do I mean when I say content? s11 00:00:44.320 --> 00:00:46.680 Well, I'm talking mostly about technical communication. s12 00:00:46.680 --> 00:00:54.000 That could be documentation, it could be things like change logs, emails, product marketing, it could be video, which I create a lot of. s13 00:00:54.000 --> 00:00:59.800 Um, and it could be other things associated with a typical DevRel motion, but it's not restricted to DevRel, right? s14 00:00:59.800 --> 00:01:06.440 Content or technical communication is the act of communicating what a what problem a product really solves. s15 00:01:06.440 --> 00:01:08.480 And that can be done by anybody. s16 00:01:08.480 --> 00:01:14.440 That might mean really complete, accurate documentation that covers every part of the Deta X this framework. s17 00:01:14.440 --> 00:01:21.040 It could be change logs shipped timely um with robust assets that cover all areas of a product. s18 00:01:21.040 --> 00:01:22.320 This is something that's often overlooked. s19 00:01:22.320 --> 00:01:28.520 This is actually really hard because to have an accurate change log, you have to have an accurate diff of your product. s20 00:01:28.520 --> 00:01:35.360 Or you could just have someone that spends a lot of their time combing through PRs to try to figure out what was shipped. s21 00:01:35.360 --> 00:01:40.600 It could be things like timely product updates, emails, which kind of follow from a change log, right? s22 00:01:40.600 --> 00:01:46.040 If you understand what changed, you can then summarize that over time for your users. s23 00:01:46.040 --> 00:01:53.200 It could be something as simple as a home page product tour instead of a static screenshot. s24 00:01:53.200 --> 00:02:09.360 These 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. s25 00:02:09.360 --> 00:02:12.040 It could also be something like video overlays, right? s26 00:02:12.040 --> 00:02:25.360 Something 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 s27 00:02:25.360 --> 00:02:26.080 via code. s28 00:02:26.080 --> 00:02:33.160 And in front of me, I have a product tour for Conductor that was built entirely with React and Remotion. s29 00:02:33.160 --> 00:02:35.920 So, basically, I recreated the product surface. s30 00:02:35.920 --> 00:02:43.080 I used a Remotion scene to recreate the product and do a full walk-through of a sample user flow. s31 00:02:43.080 --> 00:02:44.120 Now, it's not perfect. s32 00:02:44.120 --> 00:02:52.080 It'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. s33 00:02:52.080 --> 00:02:53.520 So, my name is Matt. s34 00:02:53.520 --> 00:03:00.080 I was previously a data engineer, then I led DevRel at Replit, and now I lead developer experience at Conductor. s35 00:03:00.080 --> 00:03:06.800 And today I want to talk about how content is shifting left to code as the source of truth. s36 00:03:06.800 --> 00:03:10.400 And so, I think there are three distinct eras we can think about here. s37 00:03:10.400 --> 00:03:13.640 Era one, the handcrafted era of content. s38 00:03:13.640 --> 00:03:17.840 Era two, an era where code existed, but it was quite expensive. s39 00:03:17.840 --> 00:03:21.160 And era three, where code exists, but it's very cheap. s40 00:03:21.160 --> 00:03:23.720 And that's where we are today with AI. s41 00:03:23.720 --> 00:03:26.000 So, in the handcrafted era, right? s42 00:03:26.000 --> 00:03:27.400 Everything is manual. s43 00:03:27.400 --> 00:03:31.080 The only levers we really have are time and money and skill. s44 00:03:31.080 --> 00:03:38.400 And 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, s45 00:03:38.400 --> 00:03:40.680 someone that does know how to create this thing. s46 00:03:40.680 --> 00:03:44.720 Maybe that's an agency or someone who creates these assets professionally. s47 00:03:44.720 --> 00:03:47.640 If I'm thinking about like motion graphics, for example. s48 00:03:47.640 --> 00:03:55.520 Now, post era one, when we had expensive code, code and cloud are mature assets. s49 00:03:55.520 --> 00:04:01.320 These are things that have existed for a while, and most professional software engineers know how to use. s50 00:04:01.320 --> 00:04:02.920 Engineering is now the bottleneck. s51 00:04:02.920 --> 00:04:11.160 This is like Serp era, everybody's paying a lot for engineers, and to get anything done, you really need professional software engineers. s52 00:04:11.160 --> 00:04:14.920 So, you'd better pay someone, maybe not an agency, but an engineer. s53 00:04:14.920 --> 00:04:19.840 And that included things like, you know, um robust documentation, or even just a website, right? s54 00:04:19.840 --> 00:04:30.080 You 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. s55 00:04:30.080 --> 00:04:34.280 So, you needed a professional engineer to have a really nice website. s56 00:04:34.280 --> 00:04:38.160 And what that meant was that content is really not the priority, right? s57 00:04:38.160 --> 00:04:41.640 Because if you're a professional engineer, you have better ways of spending your time. s58 00:04:41.640 --> 00:04:51.280 And I think this is reflected by um libraries like Remotion, frameworks like Remotion, um not proliferating the way that they are today. s59 00:04:51.280 --> 00:04:54.120 Because, really, who has the time and energy to put into these things? s60 00:04:54.120 --> 00:04:57.840 There aren't a ton of what I'd call content engineers. s61 00:04:57.840 --> 00:05:05.480 Now, in era three, most of these things, you're not paying a human, you're paying Anthropic, or OpenAI, or whoever, right? s62 00:05:05.480 --> 00:05:07.080 You can create videos with Claude. s63 00:05:07.080 --> 00:05:09.280 You can create documentation with Claude. s64 00:05:09.280 --> 00:05:12.919 You can design websites with Claude, and you can create motion graphics with Claude. s65 00:05:12.919 --> 00:05:16.080 Now, the problem is that not all of the all of these things are good, right? s66 00:05:16.080 --> 00:05:24.280 We'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. s67 00:05:24.280 --> 00:05:28.160 And I'm going to talk about how to do that in the rest of this presentation. s68 00:05:28.160 --> 00:05:31.120 So, today, code is cheap. s69 00:05:31.120 --> 00:05:34.480 And we talk about code as communication. s70 00:05:34.480 --> 00:05:36.800 So, code is communication. s71 00:05:36.800 --> 00:05:40.919 The fastest way to build an asset today is through code. s72 00:05:40.919 --> 00:05:44.120 And it's not just to build software, right? s73 00:05:44.120 --> 00:05:46.080 It's really to build anything. s74 00:05:46.080 --> 00:06:00.880 If 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. s75 00:06:00.880 --> 00:06:09.680 And 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 s76 00:06:09.680 --> 00:06:10.880 is actually TypeScript. s77 00:06:10.880 --> 00:06:17.360 Aside from recording myself talk or writing, every ancillary asset is React or TypeScript. s78 00:06:17.360 --> 00:06:26.720 And 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? s79 00:06:26.720 --> 00:06:30.160 I don't even really know how to write that good of TypeScript, you know? s80 00:06:30.160 --> 00:06:33.440 My background's in data engineering, I come from Python land. s81 00:06:33.440 --> 00:06:43.360 Well, 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. s82 00:06:43.360 --> 00:06:44.320 And that's wild. s83 00:06:44.320 --> 00:06:46.040 That's wild to say. s84 00:06:46.040 --> 00:06:50.040 So, if code is inexpensive, what is the expensive thing? s85 00:06:50.040 --> 00:06:51.440 Now, you might think I'm going to say taste here. s86 00:06:51.440 --> 00:06:53.720 I'm not going to say taste because everybody says taste. s87 00:06:53.720 --> 00:06:56.080 Structure is expensive. s88 00:06:56.080 --> 00:07:07.480 This 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, s89 00:07:07.480 --> 00:07:15.240 keeping design tokens in your project, separating even front-end code from back-end code from these design tokens. s90 00:07:15.240 --> 00:07:17.760 Merging really clean PRs, which like nobody does, right? s91 00:07:17.760 --> 00:07:24.440 Tagging PRs, PR descriptions, knowing what's a feature and what's a bug fix, knowing if you reverted a PR. s92 00:07:24.440 --> 00:07:25.720 How many organizations do this? s93 00:07:25.720 --> 00:07:29.240 I've worked at a number of organizations, none, right? s94 00:07:29.240 --> 00:07:34.040 And maintaining accurate internal documentation so that anybody can accomplish anything. s95 00:07:34.040 --> 00:07:40.800 Even 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? s96 00:07:40.800 --> 00:07:47.680 And so, structure often is the difference between AI purple gradient slop, right? s97 00:07:47.680 --> 00:07:50.760 And something that looks professional and polished. s98 00:07:50.760 --> 00:07:55.200 And I would even go a little bit further, and I would say that this is conscientiousness. s99 00:07:55.200 --> 00:08:04.200 And the dictionary definition for conscientiousness is the quality of being meticulous, careful, and guided by a strong sense of moral or professional duty. s100 00:08:04.200 --> 00:08:09.560 And so, it's less about comp- like software engineering skill today. s101 00:08:09.560 --> 00:08:23.320 It'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. s102 00:08:23.320 --> 00:08:34.640 And 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. s103 00:08:34.640 --> 00:08:38.560 So, what does AI reward? s104 00:08:38.560 --> 00:08:40.800 AI rewards conscientiousness. s105 00:08:40.800 --> 00:08:43.919 AI rewards organizational excellence. s106 00:08:43.919 --> 00:08:45.920 AI rewards structure. s107 00:08:45.920 --> 00:08:50.920 And ultimately, these are the things that go into good AI skills. s108 00:08:50.920 --> 00:08:54.120 There's a lot of like not very good AI skills out there. s109 00:08:54.120 --> 00:09:01.520 Um and most of them are just generated without any regard for what's in their contents or how they're structured. s110 00:09:01.520 --> 00:09:10.720 And 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. s111 00:09:10.720 --> 00:09:16.040 And they get exponentially harder to create when we lack those things. s112 00:09:16.040 --> 00:09:19.720 And so, code, again, is communication. s113 00:09:19.720 --> 00:09:25.960 And we're seeing a shift left movement for content, where content is moving to code. s114 00:09:25.960 --> 00:09:35.920 And 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 s115 00:09:35.920 --> 00:09:36.960 from code. s116 00:09:36.960 --> 00:09:44.080 In order to communicate, we need structure and conscientiousness around the way that we create code. s117 00:09:44.080 --> 00:09:49.400 And again, this only works with organizational excellence. s118 00:09:49.400 --> 00:10:01.040 And 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 s119 00:10:01.040 --> 00:10:12.320 and rigor into the process of creating software and then shift their content left towards the code through content engineering. s120 00:10:12.320 --> 00:10:17.960 And so, 2026, I think was the year of the creative technologist, at least in the DevRel space. s121 00:10:17.960 --> 00:10:20.440 This is the term that got thrown around a lot. s122 00:10:20.440 --> 00:10:24.480 I think 2027 is the year of the content engineer. s123 00:10:24.480 --> 00:10:36.080 And 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, s124 00:10:36.080 --> 00:10:47.600 screenshots, product updates, all of the things that were really manual can now be created through code, through React, and ultimately because of AI. s125 00:10:47.600 --> 00:10:49.760 Again, I'm Matt with Conductor. s126 00:10:49.760 --> 00:10:51.400 Thanks for sticking around for my talk. s127 00:10:51.400 --> 00:10:52.480 I'll catch you next time. s128 00:10:52.480 --> 00:10:54.480 Peace.