DX for Humans and Machines: Redefining Developer Experience in the Age of Vibe Coding

Thor: Thank you. Hello? Hello. Can you hear me? Lovely. It is great to be welcomed in a standing ovation. The only sad part is that probably after the talk it's not going to be that good, so we'll see. I'll try to make it worthwhile. Yes, the humans have arrived, which is great. The machines, we'll see if they're keeping up as well. Oh yeah, sorry. I was told I need to stay behind the podium here if you want the slides. So there's a good amount of kind of links within the slides, so if you want to keep a reference, they are published here so you can scan the QR code. And I didn't actually know that we have such amazing MCs available, so I actually used 11 laps. If you haven't heard of it. We do. A big part of what we do is speech synthesis and speech generation. So I actually chose a British football commentator to introduce me. I didn't know we had an amazing British person already to introduce me. So just to give you sort an idea of what we do. Actually, can I get a quick show of hands? Who has heard of 11 laps? Okay, some folks. That's awesome. Okay, let's see.

Soccer commentator voice: Ladies and gents, welcome to another glorious day in the world of developers where one name quietly does the rounds with more finesse than a late game winner at Wembley full web dev. Now he's not one for the limelight, but don't let that fool you. Behind the scenes, he's stitching together APIs with a steady hand of a seasoned clean code, calm under pressure, a bit like James Milner, but with a GitHub account. So if you are watching the play unfold and wondering who's behind the smooth moves, keep your eyes on four. Web dev might not score the goals, but he builds the stadium.

Thor: So yeah, you can see very humble. I didn't write this myself. This was an LLM. That's what the LLM thinks about me. So this is our newest model. It's called 11 V three. It's extremely expressive. You could see here there were kind of these audio texts that basically instruct, kind of direct the voice, almost like a director sort of here you should be screaming, shouting, what have you, and you can even put sound effects kind of in there in the instruction. So we do kind of AI audio, the sound effects in there as well. You could hear the stadium atmosphere that was behind that. Yeah, if you're interested in trying this out, I can give you some credits as well. You can scan the QR code here. But yeah, briefly about myself. I'm Thor, well originally from Germany, so if you speak German, I found that people can't remember Tosin when I introduce myself like that.

So I just went with the first part of my name, Thor. Somehow everyone remembers Thor if you want to follow along. Some of the content that I create, I'm just Thor web dev everywhere. I do some mobile dev as well, but when I chose the name, just had to settle on something. So Thor web dev, you can find me everywhere. I do develop a experience at 11 Labs. I'm actually visiting from Singapore. I'm mostly in Singapore, Taiwan, so it's actually coming up to midnight for me, so I'm going to try. I drank a lot of coffee, but it's great to be here in New York, which is awesome. Now I'm one of two GitHub stars in Singapore, which gives you an idea just how small Singapore is if you haven't visited. It's a great place, it's great to visit. I also do a little side kind of passion project.

It's called Hacker House Taiwan. So if you're interested to maybe get to know Taiwan, I kind of bring international software engineers to work together and get to know the local developer community in Taiwan, which is pretty cool. Lots of good food there if you haven't experienced it. And I only joined the 11 labs five months ago, so still early days. But before that, the last four years I was building a super base and then sort of my early career I was at Stripe. That's where a lot of my learning from developer experience come from here. My journey. So I actually grew up in Heidelberg, which is close to Waldorf where if you're familiar with SAP, one of the biggest German software companies comes from. So I grew up with SAPI actually started learning building websites in an SAP summer camp when I was nine years old.

So SAP did this really smart thing where they were like, okay, the employee's kids, they have summer break for six weeks, so let's just bring them in and basically teach them how to build websites. And it worked really well because actually now a lot of my childhood friends, they now work at SAP. So SAP was very smart to bring in the people early on, and so I actually did, my first summer job was kind of teaching the other employees kids how to build websites on the lamps. If you remember that Now the lamp stack stack is kind of getting revived with a lot of the wipe coating. If you can keep things very simple, if you follow Peter levels, he's like just PHP, jQuery works, the LMS understand how it works, so just keep it simple, turn the lamp back on. So that seems to be a theme.

Then after my studies, I went to Ireland, Dublin, joined Stripe early on actually initially in a support role and then built out a lot of the customer facing field engineering, sales engineering partner engineering roles. And then later on focus more on the community developer relations and actually move to Singapore with Stripe, with back then the mandate to kind of go figure out developer relations for apac, which is a big region, and then COVID hit and everything changed. But I was incredibly lucky that during that COVID time I got introduced to the founders of Superb Base who were starting superb base in Singapore. A lot of people don't know this because Superb Base is a YC company, but actually because of COVID, the summer 2020 badge back then was the first virtual badge for Y Combinator. And so a couple and Ants, the co-founders, good friends of mine as well, they were like, okay, we will just stay in Singapore and just do YC remotely from Singapore.

And it's great because Singapore has some of these 24 hour coffee shops. And so basically they just built super base at night in Singapore in empty coffee shops. It was a pretty cool vibe back then. And so now I joined 11 Labs. It's pretty cool because the mission of 11 Labs is to make any content available in any language and any voice. So where 11 Labs comes from is kind of the dubbing for the media and entertainment industry with ai. And so for me, I'm German, I work a lot kind of in the English speaking world, but then my wife is Taiwanese, so I'm trying to learn Mandarin. There's a lot of languages involved, and using 11 laps to create some messages for my in-laws is quite helpful. So yeah, so languages, audio, ai, APIs, kind of all the things that I'm excited about combined within 11 labs, which is exciting.

And then maybe looking into the future once kind of the machines have taken everything over, maybe raised some ducks and oysters in Taiwan, we'll see. We'll, what's next? Yeah, so Stripe was a great experience. This was actually March, 2016 in Dublin. Back then we were like 15 people in a coworking space next to the Guinness Brewery. Great experience. We then moved into this six story building with 30 people and there's still being built out. So a lot of my learning and my thinking around developer experience and documentation and sort of using developer experience as a marketing tool comes from Stripe. So that's sort of where I got a lot of my knowledge and tools from. So sort of how I think about good developer experience, sort of my three pillars for Good dx, the first pillar you have kind of your product and your product feedback loop.

So we work very closely with the product teams, we build parts of the APIs, we build the client libraries. And so here when a new product is being released, we are the first ones to test it. We bring it out to the customers and we see how customers are actually using it, where they are struggling and sort of bring that back to the user. So that's sort of my first pillar there. Second pillar, the content piece. Anytime you're launching a new product, obviously you have your table stakes, you have your API reference your docs, but then especially if you're out in Asia, like Southeast Asia, India, people prefer audio visual content videos. That's their preferred medium for learning. So in addition to your written content, your documentation, your end-to-end tutorials, your demos, you also want to have your video content. And my philosophy is that you want to have all these different pieces of content.

Some people prefer to just go to GitHub, clone down the code, others prefer the step-by-step. Just follow the documentation and you should have all these different pieces of content available and make sure that each piece of content references each other. So YouTube is still a huge search engine. So if someone finds your content on YouTube but they actually just want the demo code on GitHub, put it in the description, have everything reference each other. Same if they come to your documentation, it shouldn't take them more than two clicks to kind of get to their preferred medium. So that's sort of the content pillar I see. And then the third pillar, the community big piece events, hackathons, your champions programmes, your badges or not badges, that is a big piece as well. Discord X, I kind of put the partnerships piece here in here as well.

Probably partnerships can be its own pillar depending on your product. But so for example, for us, we do a lot of hackathons in partnership with CloudFlare, with Anthropic, we organise events together. And so building these strong partnerships where you can collaborate on demos, collaborate on content, collaborate on events. On that note, if you're doing some cool stuff and you want to collaborate, you need some voices, some audio, let me know, Thor web dev, we can chat and we can see what we can do. So these are from my experience working at Stripe and within developer relations and experience for a while, these are sort of the three pillars that I define for my team in terms of what we want to do now, developer experience for machines. And this comes, I'm going to give you a bit of just look at the history of how we sort of figure it out.

Okay. Hey, actually now machines are writing the code from the perspective of building superb base for the last four years. And so I want you to travel back in time with me a little bit to this is sort of May, 2020 a time. We kind of don't want to remember because that was sort of in the midst of the COVID pandemic. Extremely stressful for a lot of people. I imagine being in New York during COVID was pretty rough. Now that is kind of when superb base started and that is also sort of the reason why Superb Base is a fully remote company today because of COVID, they couldn't move to San Francisco to do Y Combinator, so they just ended up staying in Singapore, which actually was great because COVID in Singapore, yes, there were a lot of rules. You couldn't go out in large groups of people, but that meant that you could just focus on building your product.

And during that time it was funny because as superb base was going through Y Combinator in summer 2020, someone kind of accidentally launched them on Hacker News. They were like, oh yeah, demo day is coming up and we're going to do a big launch. Great, you can plan for anything but someone just found it because it's fully open source. So they were like, oh, this is awesome. They put it on a Hacka News and I remember this, so we were in a cafe in Singapore sort of catching up and they told me someone launched us on Hacka News overnight, we got like 800 databases we have to migrate because our digital ocean credits are running out. And because they were in yc, it was like, oh, we got AWS credit so we have to migrate 800 databases to AWS. And I was like, oh damn, 800 databases, that's awesome.

People are using this nice, there must be something here. And so that's kind of when I started building with Superb Base and actually realising, okay, this is really cool and sort of started contributing initially. And it's funny. So yeah, this is kind of September, 2020. You can see couple myself, COVID was terrible for me kind of health wise. Luckily I got some of the pounds off, so you can see us here in September of 2020. That was the first offsite that we organised that I organised for kind of superb base. And back then in COVID you weren't allowed to have groups of more than five people. So we had to split. We were just kind of eight people at that time. So we had to split into two groups of four people. So this is a little island just off the south coast of Singapore. And at that time I had invested in the seed round, but I wasn't an employee in Super base.

I was just kind of contributing and sort of building partnership. And it wasn an interesting time because we were just kind of building. There was no Jet GPT yet. There was no kind of AI hype trains. It felt actually incredibly slow how we were building it, which is pretty wild as we'll. See sort of how things have sped up. One thing that was also very smart that Super Bay did was they got in kind of a lot of angels from the developer relations work and that was very smart for two reasons. First A, they got money but the money wasn't the big thing. It was actually the free labour of the DevRel people because it was like, okay, they've invested so maybe they're going to talk about it. And so that was a pretty smart move. I think in addition to Super base being sort of the first really VC funded sort of open source company, that was a very smart move as well.

Focus on some derail angels, get them in, get them talking. So that's sort of how I joined Superb Base as well. Now when we look at the VI coding and the agentic coding experiences coming up, so this was kind of in November of 2024, so actually not that long ago, just a couple months. So we were looking at the charts and we were seeing the new signups, the new database creations were going through the roof and we couldn't figure out why. It was like, yeah, we were running launch weeks and we were doing a lot of kind of developer marketing, but it was just kind of out of the ordinary that jump and we were like, oh, maybe there's these new tools. So Bolt New launched in October, 2024, lovable launched in November 24. So we're like, oh, maybe it's kind of a combination of these things.

But yeah, we just saw kind of a jump there. Now fast forward one month later, this is just November to December, so end of December, 2024, January 25, it was like couple was like, okay, it's pretty clear AI is enabling more builders. So the chart is just going through the roof and you can see as well the search trends for base are just crazy going up. So now February 25, okay, this is AI builders platforms. So we're seeing kind of cursor bold, lovable VCO, windsurf kind of all these low code builders that actually some of them had been around for a while, but now they were kind of going all in on this age agentic AI stuff and they were just ramping up the signups. And the crazy thing is we actually didn't realise that beforehand that there was a trend because they just ran, implemented superb base, they just integrated it without ever talking to us.

We actually didn't know until sort of later we found out that they chose us. And actually a big reason for that was when you ask an LLM, okay, I need to persist some data, what should I use? The LLM would reply, use superb base. And because of that, a lot of these no-code builders or agentic AI coding tools, they actually were just, okay, let's just use superb base. And so that is kind of what drove things through the roof here we can see as well when V zero actually added a direct integration button, it's just kind of a hundred percent jump immediately off the projects created. So pretty wild stuff there. And then I guess the wildest thing is that just in the last quarter for superb base, basically the same amount of signups as in the last four years, and I think we noticed this as well, if we look at the last quarter, the amount of stuff that happened, it's kind of equivalent to the amount of stuff that happened in the last four years and that's pretty wild.

So everything is speeding up for super base. It was great because actually because of just these couple months and the growth that was happening, they were able to raise a series D 200 million. So pretty wild. Okay, not much time left DX for machines. I was like, yeah, actually I just asked Jet GPT, why do LMS recommend Superb Base? And it was pretty much, okay, open source powered by Postgres. So actually what we realised is that superb base LLMs, were telling you to use superb base because the entire superb base stack is open source. It's based on Postgres, which is 30 plus years of open source. So LLMs just had a lot of knowledge, a lot of context about the entire superb base stack and then also superb base has authentication, file storage, edge functions, kind of all these different bits sort of in one package.

So the LMS were just like, yeah, that's a good default, let's just use that. So when I was kind creating this talk, I was like, okay, just open source your product easy. Then I was like, okay, maybe actually not everyone can open source their product. So if that was the only takeaway from this talk, that wouldn't be so good. So I went out, okay, let's ask the community what can we do to actually get these agents, these LMS to pick up our stuff? There's a great talk from DAPs, forgot his full name. He did a CEL ship. So if you later want to watch that, it's basically around the shift from SEO now to a EO sort, the agent engine optimization I guess it's called. And it's kind of a combination of the content you create and sort of the technical way that you set up your page for the content to be found.

There's some stuff around labelled structured data within your applications. There is kind of a proposed standard, which is this L-L-M-T-X-T. So profound has actually built kind of an open source next a EO package, which actually from your next JS application auto generates this LMS txt for you. The other interesting thing is you've probably optimised all your content for SEO on Google, but now actually Jet GPT doesn't use Google, obviously. It actually uses Bing for its web browsing and search. So Index now is a tool there that you can utilise to make sure that now your content actually performs well on Bing also, which then in turn will do well on chat. GPT, Dominic Kro, fellow F German, good friend. Also some recommendations here, probably a bit more relevant for the open AI codex. So the agents.md file place that within your example projects within your client library include that, make sure OpenAI, they will look into that for context.

Another thing, have a prompt guide template in your docs. And so he called out the CloudFlare workers example here. Actually Ricky and Lizzie, the team at CloudFlare are doing amazing work because everyone's like, yeah, look at what CloudFlare is doing. They're doing it really well. So big shout out to them. So yeah, including kind of a base prompt for your users that they can copy and paste in can be helpful to really good results from your LLMs. This is a little bit more cursor specific, but it doesn't hurt to include project rules in a dot cursor directory within your example projects as you build them, include that so that people that are using Cursor kind of have a good experience there. Tanvir from the Anthropic team as well. So he's working on MCP, which obviously he calls out that you might want an MCP server that exposes your docs.

Again, he calls out kind of an example from CloudFlare. So CloudFlare actually has this CloudFlare documentation MCP server. Again, it's open source, you can check it out. Same. This has done really well for superb base as well. So the superb base MCP server as well exposes the docs to the agent. So this can be really, really helpful. Another one for kind of CLO code create a clot MD file. So this will really help Claude code to sort understand the project and understand what's going on. And then he had kind of an example as well, maybe you can write evals for how good your docs are in informing LLM code generation. I don't know if anyone is working on that, but that might be actually a great business to do. Evals for docs could be. Cool. Last one, a bit more specific to V zero dev.

If you publish V zero, dev has this community directory. You can publish starter examples there and V zero will actually kind of learn from these examples that you put in there and will take kind of code snippets from your startup projects in there. So that can be really, really helpful as well if people are sort of building with V zero. Now, obviously this space is moving incredibly quickly, so I just started up a discussion on Twitter. If you have any things that worked really, really well for you, drop that in there and maybe we can kind of get a threat going on the things that are working well for folks. I'm not proclaiming that I kind have any knowledge or authority here. The space is moving so incredibly quickly. But yeah, I'd love for us to just kind of collaborate and share what works so we can make sure that the machines use our tools as well. Right. Sweet. That is pretty much it from me. We're also hiring, we're building up the developer relations, developer advocacy team at 11 labs as well. We're hiring in the us we're hiring remotely latam as well. So yeah, if that's something you're interested to work on, let me know. Otherwise, thank you so much.