Descriptions:
Ask an assistant to compare code intelligence tools and Sourcegraph comes up 65 percent of the time. Describe the actual pain instead, that you keep breaking downstream services when you change shared libraries and cannot see all the consumers, and it comes up zero percent. It suggests your developers write a wiki page. Stephanie Jarmak ran that experiment. The gap between shopping and hurting is invisible without measuring it. Jarmak, an astronomer a year ago with no commits, now has 12,000 and maintains an open source multi agent orchestration framework under the title agent advocate. The talk title belonged to their manager, an actual developer advocate, who submitted it then went on vacation rather than deliver his own eulogy.
The argument is that developer relations is not dead, its audience changed. An agent reads your docs, calls your API, hits your errors and recommends your tool: a user whose experience is worth instrumenting. Jarmak built a benchmark of hundreds of lifecycle tasks, ran agents with and without Sourcegraph’s code navigation tool, then read the traces. In one, the model assumed a parameter name that did not exist, failed, recovered from the error text, and burned a turn on something a clearer tool description would have prevented. Buyers judge a tool on tokens and latency now, not only on whether it works. The rest is practical: get into the MCP registries, keep content fresh because stale material compounds, cut the distance to adoption, and treat it as a curb cut, built for one user and clearing the path for everyone.
Speaker info:
– https://x.com/sgjarmak
– https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephanie-jarmak
– https://www.sjarmak.ai/
Timestamps:
0:00 – An astronomer, an agent advocate, and a borrowed title
2:51 – What changes when developers stop working alone
4:19 – The agent as a user, and as a recommender
5:36 – Benchmarking agents with and without your tool
6:40 – A whole turn burned on a guessed parameter
7:42 – Generative engine optimization, and a 65 to zero gap
10:29 – Why stale content compounds against you
12:12 – Be where the agents are, and cut the friction
14:54 – What still holds: enablement, community, feedback
17:02 – The curb cut argument
