Recently, many meta discussions mock and condemn content trends on DEV and everywhere else. I already regret recently writing about online community demise and why DEV is different (at least a little bit, I hope), as the little bit seems to get smaller.
DEV's setting to hide tags, isn't working well anymore, if it ever did. Or it does, but only as a negative following priority. When there is too much spam, slop and fad shitposting, there's not much left to prioritize against.
My recommendations, sidebar, trends, discussions, and, not much of a surprise, the latest recent posts feed is full of crap, although I have already put #codingwithai, #claudecode, #cryptocurrency and #ai and several other hype hashtags on my hiding list.
This is how DEV typically presents itself to me recently when I open the front page: AI and trope titles.
The trends have changed. No more listicles, no more emoji overload, instead, five out of ten posts contain an em dash character, that long hyphen, hard to find on international developer keyboards, popular with American scholars—and with AI chatbots.
"Here is what I learned"
Other telltale signs that smell of sloppy writing assistance: "here is what I learned". Intended to signal authenticity, they have become red flags for the opposite, at least in most cases. The current year, 2026 right now, is one of the few evergreen attempts that might be legitimate, but adds negative points to my gut feeling heuristics. Similarly, I couldn't care less about the best dentists in Jaipur or posts in a language that I can't even read.
Maybe DEV and their productive AI community can vibe-code a spam filter that actually works? I will check back in a few weeks and see if things improved.
Write-only
Otherwise, I will have to treat DEV like LinkedIn and medium: a write-only platform to dump some marketing content. I really hope that's not where DEV is going.
Top comments (3)
Hm I don't know - for me the amount of spam is drastically less than it was 1 or 2 years ago ...
Yes, there's quite a lot of content about AI (coding tools, agents, etc), but most of it is pretty well-written and reasonably interesting - and even though I'm not a big AI Coding aficionado yet, I do value keeping up to date with the trends & the times ...
Can't say that I always understand the details when people go deep on agents and MCP and RAG and whatnot - but sometimes I have the idea that I learned something after reading an article, and there are often interesting discussions in the comments section ...
If you genuinely "hate the guts" of AI, then it's admittedly not a great time to be alive ;-) - but personally I prefer those articles over the inane "listicles" which dominated previously - I'm happy that we largely got rid of those!
I'm curious though: you made it pretty clear what kind of content you're not interested in - but what is the kind of content that you do want to see? Just asking for my curiosity ...
You must be right. I remember discussions like "you can't get a voice in here anymore" around 2022 or 2023. The Web3 Crypto NFT Bored Ape are was annoying, but AI in its current form is dangerous on another level. @wynandpieters' article We've Seen This Movie Before gets right to the point. So yes, maybe we should really hate the fad this time.
I agree that the amount of AI content and its "dominance" gets a bit too much sometimes - but, there are often quite interesting discussions, check out the comments section on some AI articles and you'll see what I mean ...
What I like most are the more conceptual articles and discussions, revolving around development processes and architecture etc - often these discussions revolve around NOT using AI in some scenarios, or about reducing its risks - I think that should appeal to you ...