Developer Tools

“This is, this has actually informed our investment thesis in a few investments recently.”

“In this era it's AI optimization. And so these products are now the distribution mechanism for all the downstream products and services that you can use. And they tend to prioritize the tools that have the best developer and user experience.”

“Developing an intuitive fuel, like a hands-on fuel for The agents, their limitations, their capabilities, and very specifically around what we're talking about here is like, what type of tools the agents work well with? where do they get stuck? And once you s…”

“I think, yeah, if you're selling a developer tool, like having good docs that are out there, like having social proof, like Maybe being posted on Reddit a little bit more. All of that helps your case tremendously.”

“I feel like in developer tool space, you want to build good products for each of those. Otherwise people won't use them. People will just build their homegrown things and all that.”

“What if the agent is integrated into the framework so that you can, if the application fails to run, you can ask the agent that has access to all of the context. And that's going to be more and more, I think like a lot of the, you know, developers will build s…”

“And the interesting thing is, if you're even half a generation or one generation behind, it actually makes a big difference compared to if you're on top of the latest tools.”

“It's rare that you see ubiquity is what I'm trying to say in the world of developers.”

“LLMs.txt or raw markdown is better for agents. So if you're building developers still today, you have to have that duality in your head. You need to think, okay, How do I make my content, my errors, my developer tools great for agents?”

“But I also imagine, like, later for those developer tools they might have new ways for people to use it. Like, instead of, like, read documents, you might have a prompt that you can just take and start integrating into the into your application.”

“You have a very small window by which you can make a very good impression. And if you don't deliver that, that bit is effectively flipped. It's really, really hard to come back from, hey, give this another shot. It's gotten better or what have you. So develope…”

“Developers don't like being sold to. They have a BS detector that's very sensitive. And so I think as you think about the products, it really can't be buzzwordy. It actually has to have some utility or provide some, something that's meaningful, that helps thei…”

“Especially for a developer audience who is very, very opinionated, if you make a mistake, if there's a small window in which you can apologize and try to recoup that trust or respect, you really have to take advantage of it.”

“You should at least be able to use your own tool. And be proud to use it or feel like it's providing some value, the V in the V, it's viable for you. And if you can't even get your, you can't bring yourself to use your own product. It's a little weird to be tr…”

“Unless you sell developer tools, like, totally useless, right? We would get, we did get there a couple times. Our Google Analytics traffic spiked, and then we just got, you know, a bunch of people who said our product sucks in the comments, so that was fun.”

“And then we see a huge, like, we're very bullish on the trend of developer tools. The way that we think here at Polychrome is, and like the old age old analogy is we think about like the best way to make money in a gold rush is to sell the picks and shovels. S…”

“I think that the right way to do this is like as a company to take on that responsibility to approach this from a product perspective and not just the firefighting, but to be like, okay, if you're going to build this as a product and not just as a tool, not ju…”

“Engineers are insanely expensive, right? they're only getting more expensive. And if you can return even like two hours of productivity per engineer per month, you've, you know, paid your paid your way easily.”

“That doesn't work anymore, because if you just go to go to the someone who's a decision maker, And unless you have bought buy-in and already ground up adoption from developers and the practitioners, no decision maker wants to give a tool or a product to their …”

“Doing open core on a developer tool is not going to get you very far.”