By Steve Ngok, Chief Strategy Officer, DoraHacks
Introduction
Every company building a developer platform says the same thing: "We're all about the developer ecosystem." They hire DevRel teams. They sponsor hackathons. They fill Discord servers with thousands of hopeful builders. Then they watch, confused, as their ecosystem fails to grow.
Here's the uncomfortable truth: most companies don't have a good DevRel team to begin with. They're understaffed, undertrained, or an afterthought. But here's what's worse: even companies that invest heavily in DevRel hit the same ceiling. A great DevRel team of 10 people cannot meaningfully support 10,000 developers. Their capacity has hard limits. And those limits become your ecosystem's limits.
The bottleneck isn't your product or documentation. It's the humans you're asking to scale the unscalable.
The Three Fatal Flaws of Traditional DevRel
1. The Capacity Ceiling
Your DevRel team has 24 hours in a day. They answer Discord questions, write tutorials, review hackathon submissions, fly to conferences, and take calls with promising projects. Every hour spent on one developer is an hour not spent on another.
Let’s do the math. 5 DevRel people, 5,000 active developers. That's 1,000 developers per person. Give each developer just 5 minutes of attention per month and you've already blown past any reasonable workload. We’ve seen this hundreds of times at DoraHacks when supporting DevRels from our partners.
So they triage. They focus on the loudest voices and the most visible projects. Everyone else gets a docs link and a prayer.
2. The Information Black Hole
Here's a question most DevRel teams can't give a correct answer: Who is building on your platform right now, and where are they stuck?
Not the top 10 projects you already know. All of them. The developer in São Paulo who hit an authentication error last week. The team in Berlin who submitted to your hackathon but went quiet. The indie builder who chose your competitor because nobody responded in 48 hours.
Traditional DevRel operates with almost no visibility. They don't know who's building what, what's blocking them, or when they're about to leave. They discover a project churned months later. They find a great builder only after they've shipped somewhere else.
You can't support what you can't see.
3. Reactive, Not Proactive
Traditional DevRel is firefighting. Someone asks a question, you answer. Someone complains, you respond. Someone churns, you do a post-mortem (maybe).
The best DevRel teams want to be proactive. They want to reach out before developers get stuck, spot struggling projects early, and identify high-potential builders to give them extra attention.
But when you're already underwater handling inbound requests, proactive outreach becomes a luxury you can't afford. The urgent always kills the important.
The Hidden Cost to Your Ecosystem
These problems compound into real damage.
Developers churn silently. They don't announce they're leaving. They just stop building. By the time you notice, they've already shipped on another platform.
Good projects die early. A builder hits a wall, can't get help, and gives up. You never knew they existed.
Competitors win with a single DM. While your team is stretched thin, a competitor's DevRel reaches out personally. That's all it takes.
Your team burns out. Endless tickets, constant context-switching, never enough time. Your best DevRel people leave for less chaotic roles.
The bottleneck quietly kills your growth, and eventually, your company.
Enter Agentic DevRel
We're not asking you to replace your DevRel team. We're asking you to remove the ceiling on what they can do.
Agentic DevRel means deploying AI agents as a force multiplier for your human team. These agents work 24/7, speak every language, and engage with hundreds of developers simultaneously. They handle the work that doesn't scale manually, so your human DevRel can focus on what actually requires a human.
Your DevRel team sets the strategy, builds relationships, and makes judgment calls. The agents handle the rest: monitoring thousands of projects, answering routine questions instantly, following up when someone goes quiet, surfacing the signals that matter.
One DevRel person, augmented by agents, can now do what used to require a team of twenty.
What Agentic DevRel Actually Does
Proactive Tracking: Agents monitor every project in your ecosystem. They check GitHub commits, track hackathon submissions, and notice when active builders go quiet. They follow up automatically: "Hey, noticed you haven't pushed in two weeks. Stuck on something?"
Smart Triage: Agents analyze activity patterns and flag high-potential builders for human follow-up. Your team's limited time goes where it matters most.
Instant Support: A developer hits an error at 3am in Tokyo. An agent responds in seconds with relevant documentation, code examples, or a direct solution. No waiting for someone in a different timezone to wake up.
Data-Driven Insights: Which API endpoints cause the most confusion? Which docs do people read but still ask questions about? Agents collect this data automatically, turning thousands of interactions into actionable improvements.
Personalized Outreach: Agents know what each developer is building. When you release a new feature relevant to their project, they reach out with tailored guidance. Not spam blasts. Actual relevance.
Why Now
This wasn't possible two years ago. Three things changed.
LLMs can actually code. They understand technical context, read documentation, and give useful answers. They're not chatbots pretending to help. They're capable collaborators.
Developers already work with AI. Cursor, Copilot, ChatGPT. Your developers are already comfortable getting help from AI tools. An AI DevRel agent isn't strange. It's expected.
First movers will compound their lead. The companies that deploy agentic DevRel now will build better ecosystems, attract more developers, and generate more data to make their agents even smarter. Those who wait will wonder why they're falling behind.
The window to lead is open. It won't stay open forever.
It's Already Happening
To grow your developer ecosystem, you need to maximize reach and maximize retention. Get more developers in the door, and keep them building once they're here.
Hackathons are your acquisition engine. They capture developer attention, onboard builders to your platform, and generate real projects. But most teams run a handful per year because hackathons are operationally heavy.
DevRel is your retention engine. It keeps developers engaged, unblocks them when they're stuck, and prevents them from quietly churning. But most teams can only support a fraction of their community.
At DoraHacks, we've run hundreds of hackathons with close to a million developers. We learned the hard way that traditional approaches don't scale. So we built something different.
Hackathon AI lets you capture any trend and spin up a hackathon instantly. Developers onboard in minutes, not days. Engagement starts immediately and continues long after the event ends.
DevRel AI monitors your entire builder community. It tracks progress, answers questions, flags at-risk developers, and keeps every project moving forward. No one falls through the cracks.
Maximize reach. Maximize retention. That's how you win the ecosystem game.
Your DevRel team is your bottleneck. It doesn't have to be.
Build Your Dynamic Ontology. Start Now.
Every developer who builds on your platform has a creative journey. They start with an idea, hit obstacles, learn new skills, ship projects, and evolve as builders. Most of this journey is invisible. It happens in private repos, late-night debugging sessions, and on Discord, where messages disappear into the void.
Dynamic ontology changes that. It captures and documents every developer's creative journey in your ecosystem. What they built, what they learned, how they grew. This isn't just data. It's the living memory of your developer community.
When you combine dynamic ontology with agentic DevRel, something powerful happens. Your agents don't just respond to developers. They understand them. They know where each builder came from, what they're capable of, and where they're headed. Every interaction becomes smarter, more personal, more valuable.
The companies building their dynamic ontology today are laying the foundation for the next decade of developer relations. They're not just running hackathons or answering support tickets. They're becoming the home for the global hacker movement.
This is the war for developer mindshare. The winners will be the ones who start early, invest in agentic infrastructure, and build ecosystems that truly see and support every developer.
We're already doing this at DoraHacks. The question is: are you ready to build yours?
About DoraHacks
DoraHacks is the leading global hackathon community and open source developer incentive platform. DoraHacks provides toolkits for anyone to organize hackathons and fund early-stage ecosystem startups.
DoraHacks creates a global hacker movement in Web3, AI, Quantum Computing and Space Tech. So far, more than 30,000 startup teams from the DoraHacks community have received over $92M in funding, and a large number of open source communities, companies and tech ecosystems are actively using DoraHacks together with its BUIDL AI capabilities for organizing hackathons and funding open source initiatives.
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