I have been chewing on a simple idea that refuses to leave. Attention is a resource with high contention. That is not a moral statement, it is just the reality of how the world works right now. We can try to change it, we can opt out of it for ourselves, or we can acknowledge it and build within it. Businesses are not in the business of ignoring reality, so they should embrace it, then decide how to use it with care.
This is a much harder terrain when the audience is developers. Developers are not passive consumers. They are builders with taste, strong opinions, and a high sensitivity to anything that feels like noise. The old playbook still shows up everywhere. Sponsor a conference booth. Put your logo on newsletters. Announce a feature with a press release. It is not that these things do not work. It is that they are tired. The attention is limited, the format is stale, and developers do not find it cool. That is the heart of the challenge.
If attention is contested, then the winners are not the loudest or the richest. The winners are those who earn focus by contributing signal. That is why I keep coming back to the older writings on this topic. Herbert A. Simon wrote that "a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention" in 1971. It is a line that feels more true every year. These are not just academic ideas. They are useful lenses for anyone who wants to build a modern developer business. We are not only competing against similar products. We are competing against all the other stimuli that occupy a developer mind.
Marketing to developers has always been a bit awkward. Many developers have a radar for hype. They are allergic to empty adjectives. They read technical docs and skim the rest. They value peer trust more than corporate messaging. The Cluetrain Manifesto captured that cultural shift in the late 1990s with "markets are conversations." In developer ecosystems it is even more literal. If you do not show up in the conversation as a peer, you are a billboard. Billboards get scrolled away.
The reason I think the old playbook is breaking now is the world of AI. It is not enough to say you are using AI. It is not enough to publish a case study that says you reduced costs. Developers want to know what you are building that pushes the frontier and what role you are going to play in the world that is forming. They want to know how you are shaping the future and whether your work is additive or extractive. To say you are keeping up with AI is to say you are following. Developers do not follow followers.
That means companies need to take a position. Not only a technical position, but a cultural one. What do you believe about how AI should change how we build software. Where do you want to empower users and where do you want to challenge them. What are you willing to make open. What are you willing to let go. In an era of accelerants, a company that does not state a vision gets defined by the narratives of others. Attention will land somewhere, so you might as well give it a north star.
At a personal level this becomes a lot of individual exploration. I talked about this yesterday, and I cannot get the idea out of my head. I do not want my work to be a marketing artifact. I want it to be an exploration, a real attempt, with curiosity and risk. The sharing is part of the process, not a campaign. I share what I do even when it gets rejected or misunderstood. I am fine with that. Some people need time to embrace new models, and that includes me and the people closest to the work. Some people will reject anything that is different. That is fine. I do not want to optimize for the average response. I want to find the people who are curious enough to join the experiment.
That is how I landed on Plasma, which I am exploring as a multi platform agentic coding experience that could replace React Native if we figure out how to hot reload changes, or at least UI. I feel we are stagnated in the mobile space. We are living inside an endless dream of ideas that a few players pushed years ago and then moved on to other ecosystems with more movement. I want to bring something fresh back. I want AI to feel different on mobile too.
This is where attention, marketing, and product become the same thing. If you are doing real work that is ahead of the curve, the work itself becomes the marketing. It is not a press release. It is a consistent stream of explorations, prototypes, failures, and learnings. People pay attention not because you asked for it, but because they see a line of thought they can align with. In other spaces you can find similar dynamics. In music, listeners bond with artists who expose their process, not only the final songs. In open source, people rally around maintainers who show their reasoning and invite the community into the trade offs. In education, the best teachers are not those who broadcast facts but those who let you think with them.
The idea that attention is earned by contribution shows up elsewhere too. In the AI era the medium is not a static website or a blog. The medium is your ability to collaborate with your users in near real time. If your product is not a living conversation, the conversation happens without you. This is why developer tooling companies that ship in public, write technical deep dives, and open their roadmaps tend to earn trust. It is not because they are louder, but because they are more legible.
There is also a cautionary note. The attention economy can distort values. Algorithmic feeds reward novelty and outrage. If you are a company, chasing that behavior is tempting but corrosive. Short term attention can sabotage long term trust. Developers notice when you are extracting attention without giving value back. They will remember.
The tension is not going away. The solution is not to retreat or to yell louder. The solution is to show your work and take a stance. Make your experiments visible. Treat exploration as a product. Let people join the journey. If it fails, that is also part of the story. People do not want brands, they want builders. People do not want slogans, they want evidence.
This is why I am bullish on a more personal approach to marketing. The old model assumed that a company can stay behind a wall while its marketing department speaks for it. That is not how developer trust works. Developers want to know who is building the tool, what they care about, and what they are doing about the future. That does not mean you must be a public figure. It means the company needs to act like a person. It needs to show its mind.
The past has some useful reference points. The Cluetrain Manifesto was a reminder that conversations are the market. These are old references, but their relevance grows as the noise grows. The only thing that changed is the speed and scale of the attention market.
So I am leaning into it. I am going to keep exploring, sharing, and refusing to play it safe. I want to build products and experiments that prove a point rather than pitch a feature. If that earns attention, good. If it does not, I still learned something that pushes my craft forward. That is the deal I am willing to make.
I do not think developer marketing is broken. I think it is evolving into something more honest. It is the era of builders who communicate in the same way they build. It is the era of companies that take positions and put their work on the table. I want to be part of that, and I want my work to be part of the conversation, not a banner on the side of it.
References that influenced this line of thought: Herbert A. Simon on attention scarcity, The Cluetrain Manifesto, Amusing Ourselves to Death.