Technology Evangelist

AI coding assistants have become basically omnipresent at this point and it’s honestly just crazy to think how quickly it all happened. I remember when Copilot first came out and was met with this weird mix of “is this magic” and “ugh this is so buggy”. And now there’s Claude doing full re-factors, ChatGPT giving you a complete project from a couple sentences description, and a dozen other smaller tools which honestly sometimes do a better job at small things than the big generative models. But here’s the thing, the tools… well… aren’t going to be replacing developers any time soon (I’m dropping the hot take now) but they are DEFINITELY shifting the types of work that we do.

One thing I have noticed is that these tools are REALLY good for the tedious, mundane, repetitive stuff. Writing some boilerplate code? Probably done in 3 seconds. Convert some legacy code from framework A to framework B? AI will at least give you a passable base that can be refactored, rather than you writing everything by hand from scratch. Autocomplete features are also quite addicting tbh, it’s to the point where once you get used to it you never want to go back to just writing everything yourself without suggestions. Your brain just offloads the “wait what’s the syntax for this” and you can focus on the more complicated logic and architecture decisions.

The downside is… the code produced can be meh? Like it works but isn’t good. It’ll do what you asked but often with missing edge cases or will produce something correct but an older dev will cry during code review (I myself have committed at least one of these heinous things that’s technically correct but no one should write). I’ve seen AI functions with massive responsibilities or doing too many things all in one go, or writing a correct answer but in an unnecessarily slow manner. It’s using pattern-matching to generate answers but it does not actually understand performance so it can do really stupid things. So of course you need to review everything super duper carefully (learned that the hard way after shipping a bug that was literally right there in the suggested code by AI)

Debugging is pretty interesting tbh. You paste your error message and some context and get some suggestions and occasionally it’s impressively accurate! Obviously not every time but frequently enough where I have folded it into my regular process now. So instead of immediately searching or checking docs I ask the AI. Worst case it’s giving me the wrong answer and I go research anyway, best case it points me directly to what I need to fix and I save like 15 minutes of Googling. I think on average it probably saves 20-30% of debugging time which really adds up over a week.

Authenticity is one of those perennial questions with this work. You are an employee of Company X, on the payroll to evangelize their products. Everyone knows that. But at the same time, you are supposed to be a trusted voice within the community to developers. Give it to them straight. Be “real” with them. When you work at some multi-national Fortune 500 with public stock, how does that work? The good evangelists navigate that tightrope by being actually critical when the moment demands it, even about the tech and products of their own company. They’ll tweet “yeah the new API version is rough in places, here’s the workaround I’m using,” not hawking their employer’s wares without a whiff of a critique. The bad evangelists are the literal walking billboards. You can smell their breath from across the conference hall.

Junior devs are getting maybe too reliant on these tools, I think. I think if you never learned how to actually read documentation or grok the fundamentals because you just ask AI for all the answers… that’s going to come back to bite you later. These tools are supposed to augment your skillset, not replace learning the basics. I mean, senior devs use the tools heavily too so this isn’t meant as an attack on juniors, but seniors can usually tell when the AI is spewing garbage or taking an objectively bad approach because they have the years of experience to recognize. Juniors will often blindly accept… or not recognize they’re being blindsided. Which is not good.

Code reviews and team dynamics are also changing in some very subtle but real ways as well and I don’t think this has really been talked about enough. For one, code reviews are now ALSO checking what a human accepted from an AI, which means you’re not just reviewing your teammates code but the AI’s as well? The bar feels different? You start to get this “oh the AI also suggested it” fallacy creep in as well. Onboarding people is weird now because you have to teach them not just development but how to properly use these AI tools, which is kind of… a skillset in its own right?

There’s the open source side of things, because much of the best evangelism often happens in those communities where developers contribute because it’s their passion project and they aren’t expecting a return on investment the next quarter. Answering questions on Stack Overflow at midnight? It’s not because your quarterly targets demand it, but because that’s how you build trust and rapport. Fixing bugs in another project’s docs? Not for that quarter’s numbers, but for the overall ecosystem’s good. Developer evangelism can’t shake that friction between community cultivation and that drive for short-term company gains. Every company does it a little differently and the companies that do this well handle it differently as well, obviously. Some that just…

Man, I don’t even know what to say about the future of this work, other than I think AI is going to upend the whole thing. If a developer needs sample code, it’s now a five-second Google search or chat with ChatGPT. “I’m having this error” doesn’t need to mean “please join our Discord server.” So does this make evangelism less relevant, or more? Does the human connection mean more because the bread and butter tasks have been automated? Likely a little of both. The work is morphing and evolving already, whatever happens with tech. Five years ago, developer livestreams were not a thing. Ten years ago, Twitter was not the primary form of communication between dev and evangelist. No one knows what the hell’s next.