Every day, the game posts 16 new words. The challenge is to group them into four categories. It looks something like this:

(That’s one that I made myself—I’ll show the answer below, in case you want to pause and solve it)

Some Connections categories are easier than others. Yellow and green categories are easier, something like:

NEWT, FROG, SALAMANDER, TOAD (Amphibians)

The harder categories are blue and purple, which often include trivia or wordplay. This one might be a little tricky until you see it:

HOCKEY, JORDAN, QUALITY INDEX, BUD (Air ____)

Some people try to get a “reverse rainbow,” where you get the hardest (purple) first. Then you can pat yourself on the back as you report your score to others:

🟪🟪🟪🟪
🟦🟦🟦🟦
🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟨🟨🟨🟨

Ok, when I said “some people,” I meant me. I’m always aiming for purple-first and a reverse rainbow. It usually requires me to figure out several (or all) of the categories before a single guess.

Others play by guessing the first category they see, whatever the color happens to be. And, sure, even though I’ve moved beyond that approach, it’s a perfectly reasonable way to play.

In fact, there are only two rules to Connections:

1. Choose four word boxes per guess
2. Don’t make more than three mistakes

Yet, once you start talking to other players, you realize that many people create their own Connections criteria. For some, they’re loose guidelines. For others, to do the opposite is cheating.

Some of the various “rules” I’ve heard:

• Guess the first category you see
• Find all the categories before you guess
• Shuffle the board as soon as it loads
• Always try to make zero mistakes
• Never guess the first category you see
• You can’t look up any unknown words
• Don’t guess a category by process of elimination
• Look at other players’ scores to get hints from patterns

Yesterday I hit 147 straight games correctly answering Connections. That means I’ve made it several months without a four-mistake bust. I’m hopeful I’ll earn the 150-game streak badge on Friday.

After playing hundreds of games, I know which decoys to watch for. Show me a purple-last pattern and I’ll probably silently judge it to myself. According to the rules of Connections, a three-mistake puzzle solved from easiest to hardest is just as much of a win as a no-mistake reverse rainbow. They both count toward that streak!

Even though the game is simple and has minimal restrictions, people often make it harder on themselves intentionally. It gets really dicey when they hold others to the same constraints.

Often, we see our own reality as fact. We can’t remove the “real” from reality. That takes objectivity that just can’t happen internally.

The developers you want to use your product live in their own reality, using a distinct set of guidelines and beliefs that are likely very different from yours. Maybe they try to reverse-rainbow your traditional rainbow documentation.

You can talk to them (and I hope you do) to get some ideas of what they experience. Even that can be hard, since product teams can easily fall into confirmation bias. Often there are topics and areas you might not consider at all from your perspective (just like I’ll likely get a whole list of new Connections “rules” from people reading this).

More types of developers exist than ever before. Each comes with its own level of knowledge and guidelines for how they approach their work. These factors shape how they search for tools, evaluate them, and decide whether to adopt them.

Most of them will ask AI for tool recommendations and other assistance. How they ask can differ, as can which models they use.

Don't assume you know how they’re playing their game, because it’s not the same as yours.

Adam

P.S. Okay, here come the answers to my puzzle (which was designed to be mean, by the way). Presented in classic rainbow pattern—don’t judge me!

I first heard about this in a Malcolm Gladwell or Stephen Dubner book. One of those PopSci titles that I probably didn’t finish. There was a real study that looked at the names of dentists. Its data seemed to suggest that, because of the familiarity of their own name, Dennises go to dental school at higher rates than people with other names.

(The study has since been debunked—it turns out the study compared names that have become less popular, so the pattern tracked across industries)

Dennis the Dentist came to mind Monday night as I was dozens of tabs deep into a Wikipedia binge. At some point, I blacked out and woke up browsing the personal details of American Revolution-era painter Charles Willson Peale. He’s best known for painting George Washington:

The names of Peale’s children jumped out at me:

• Rembrandt
• Raphaelle
• Rubens

I don’t need an art history class to recognize Renaissance painters.

What surprised me most was what came in the next three tabs (I couldn’t resist clicking those names). Rembrandt, Raphaelle, and Rubens Peale all became painters themselves. His eldest daughter did, as well. She was named after Swiss painter Angelica Kauffman, who co-founded the Royal Academy of Art in London.

(As for Donatello and Michelangelo, both Peale and I have missed the opportunity to name our children after Ninja Turtles)

That’s four children named after artists who all became artists themselves. This might be more impressive than dentally determined Dennises.

Surely, Papa Peale surrounded his children with artwork and they were encouraged to practice the craft. But the name had to mean something, too.

(It turns out we nearly have an academic study of our own, because Peale had 16 children—all the others appear to have chosen other professions, including three more named after painters)

Now, I know times were different, but as a father I also know you can only control your children so much (seriously, you picked that shirt for picture day!?). Charles Willson Peale could not force his offspring to become artists, but he did create the right environment for them to pursue painting. Right down to the names he gave them.

Have you sensed this might have something to do with developers? Good on you, here it comes...

You can’t compel a developer to use your product. But you can create the right environment for them: Understand the types of problems they want to solve, make it easy to adopt your product with their tools, and be careful that your words don’t give off a marketing smell.

Words and labels are powerful. Looking at eight months of LLM Rank data, I’ve noticed how word choice impacts what the models return. How you describe your product and what it can do decides whether you’re visible. How AI currently recommends you or your competitors is data you can use to be ready for the next model’s training cutoff.

The LLM Rank Report is now available for every category I’ve tracked, including AI coding, CI/CD, and vector databases.

Check out the sample report so you know what to expect. Then get a copy for your product category to share within your organization.

Be the one who, like many in the Peale family, can paint a compelling, accurate picture. It starts with data that shows what they care about.

Unlike many people, I'm not really a soccer fan, which had me frequently confused.

They'd pass the ball from player to player, never really gaining any ground... it's a whole lot of activity for not much payoff. Most of the time, it ended with a weak shot or a deflected pass. Then the other team would go to the other end of the field and do the same thing.

I'm not going to call soccer boring. Mainly because I'm a baseball fan and I know people throw that same word back at my sport.

Let's say I don't appreciate the finer points of soccer. Often, my misunderstanding would make me the only one cheering. After 40 minutes of what seemed like nothing happening, suddenly there's a guy with an open shot and he pushes it past the keeper.

GOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAALLLLLLLL!!!

Except nobody else is cheering. They saw the offsides.

From my layfan perspective, the most exciting thing I've seen all game didn't even count. The rules say a player's body can't be in front of the ball. The violation seems to be called inconsistently, at least based on how many times I hear soccer fans yell "offsides" while the refs stay mum.

Frustrated, I was happy to switch over to my beloved baseball every time one of those World Cup games ended.

Then I watched my baseball team get scored on with what felt like a pretty dang arbitrary balk call. A "balk" is any illegal motion made by the pitcher with runners on base. Everyone advances a base when it happens. Even a runner one base away from home plate!

The TV showed the replay a half dozen times. I never saw the balk that the umpire did.

Like offsides, there are very specific rules to a balk. Officials often choose not to call these infractions, despite the clear definitions. And other times they see something that might have barely been there.

The point is not that refs and umps are stupid, because they aren't. They make subjective decisions based on their interpretation of the rulebook.

We're all living this reality, but not just in sports. Developers write deterministic code with LLMs that act more like refs and umpires. We expect yes/no booleans and we end up with maybes. If you've interacted with AI, you're probably familiar with these patterns:

• Models that generate writing that you think is “slop”
• LLMs that might recommend your competitor instead of your product
• AI chatbots that can't follow your instructions because they have to ask for one more clarification, insert a caveat here or there, and waffle their way toward saying absolutely nothing while moving the task you sent them not a single iota forward

😬 Or is that last one just me?

Developers are still wrestling with these new tools, finding the best ways to use them. And you want to help them get your product into that workflow.

That means understanding enough to call the game the way developers see it. And not cheering too hard when it's CLEARLY offsides.

We were traveling to Sweden for the Nordic APIs conference. I brought my dad because we have Swedish heritage and he’d never been. Plus, who doesn’t want to see their son talk about APIs? Ok, so maybe the talk wasn’t the highlight.

On a walk through the oldest part of Stockholm, we saw many souvenir shops. Every single one sold an item I did not expect to see in Sweden: Swiss Army Knives.

Real quick geography check: the Swiss live in Switzerland, not Sweden. These are separate countries almost 1,000 miles apart. Why are they selling another nation’s titular knife?

Remember that they’re in every shop. Often, they have dozens, lined up in a display case. Some had Sweden’s blue-and-yellow colors rather than the Swiss red. Is that better? I think it might be more confusing.

My theory is that clueless tourists go into these shops and ask for a Swiss Army Knife. For a while, the shop owners explained that the Swedes aren’t Swiss. But when your primary purpose is to move merchandise, you follow the market.

You sell Swiss Army Knives. Or Swedish Army Knives.

Perception is reality.

This holds true for the sightseer in Gamla Stan and also the developer looking for new tools. If you match their perception, they’ll find you. If you present a different reality, you could be missed.

That’s why I love digging into the data on how LLMs recommend dev tools. By comparing multiple queries, you can identify how the market positions your product.

Do you help developers support user authentication or implement login management? Does your dev tool provide static analysis or scan dependencies?

LLM Rank and the data behind it show you what developers see when they ask AI to solve dev problems. The models were trained on developer conversations, so answers reflect what they perceive. I can help you take action on the data so you can better match that developer reality.

What’s the Swiss Army Knife you need to sell, even if it doesn’t make sense on the surface?

It’s often hard to reason these things from within the company building the product. Just as our host did not understand when Dad pulled out a pocket knife (neither Swiss nor Swedish) at the restaurant.

Ok, so I can’t say I can make sense of that action, either, other than to say “that’s my dad.” But I also didn’t expect the strong reaction from our host, who informed him it’s illegal to carry any knife in public unless it’s a tool of your profession.

“Oh, I’m a farmer,” my dad said, at least a decade out of tending any fields, and certainly not any on that trip to Sweden. Luckily, we didn’t have to explain it to the Stockholm Police.

Want to better understand your developer audience? Let’s find your Swedish Army Knife.

You know the one:

Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart is iconic. Though we’ve lost the singer, we’ll still have the refrain:

(Turn around, bright eyes) Every now and then, I fall apart (Turn around, bright eyes) Every now and then, I fall apart

The song was on my mind again recently as I chased a total eclipse (of the sun) in the Bay of Biscay.

For me, it was my third. I’ve gone to the beaches of Mazatlan, Mexico, and the high desert of Terrebonne, Oregon. Each time, my family and I watched as the moon started to mask the light from the sun. It’s unsafe to look directly into the sun, but you can follow the progress through special glasses.

Or poke a hole in a piece of paper and let sunlight shine through it. On the ground below, the paper creates a shadow, except where the hole is. Instead of a round sun, you’ll see the crescent shape of the eclipse. It’s pretty crazy.

But by far the best part is that moment of totality. The moon completely obscures the sun and you’re surrounded by darkness.

Once upon a time, there was light in my life But now there’s only love in the dark Nothing I can say A total eclipse of the heart

Bonnie Tyler got one thing right: there’s nothing I can say to explain it. Maybe that’s why I keep chasing eclipses and why I wanted my kids to see one too.

Totality lasts only a few minutes, but so much builds up to it. Even after totality ends, it takes much longer for the moon to fully pass across the sun.

It’s tempting to think of developer adoption as that one moment when your product is recommended, or a dev integrates your SDK. But that obscures everything that led up to that moment. And yeah, everything that needs to happen after, too.

Like my yoga teacher also says, you need to be flexible. In this case, flexible about how you describe your product. Your positioning should match how the right developers search for solutions.

They should need you now tonight, more than ever.

Want my help getting clear on these developers? Let’s make it right so we can never be wrong together.

P.S. My favorite cover of Total Eclipse of the Heart is exceptionally weird, but memorable. How can you be that unforgettable (without destroying appliances)?

As Portland expanded in the early 1900s, settlers built the area I now stroll through when I need a break. On many street corners, I look down and see a familiar stamp in the pavement:

Perhaps Elwood Wiles was the only sidewalk artist in town. Or maybe he’d mastered a concrete craft few others had. I see other names and later years once I walk beyond my neighborhood, but Elwood seems to have imprinted himself on the square mile around my house.

Let’s get one thing straight: he didn’t always spell the street names correctly. At every corner, he pressed letters into wet cement, one at a time, to identify each road. There’s a GLENN AVE that is very clearly GLEEN. Around the bend, there’s an unexplained 31TH.

What he lacked in spelling he made up for in structural integrity. Some tiles crack at the edges, and a few have completely crumbled, but most of Elwood’s work is intact after 115+ years.

His name is still there too, nearly 12 decades after he pressed it into that mix of sand and stone.

The good news for you: your impressions don’t need to last nearly that long.

But there’s a lot of noise, so you need to cut through it with a giant concrete saw of clarity. Know the ​contexts where you want to be discoverable​. Make sure you show up when developers look for those solutions.

That means knowing how and when LLMs recommend you. No surprise here: I can help you stress-test your positioning against Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and others.

Want an objective view of how your product is seen? This is the last week to get a custom report. Reports start at $499 and include a call with me. Reply to let me know you’re interested.

But what about The Office birthday party?

The U.S. television series had one of the worst onscreen parties. Planned by Dwight Shrute, the salesman lacking the simplest of social skills, nothing said celebration: the neutral color balloons were half-filled, masking tape was haphazardly attached to miserable streamers, and the sign had big black lettering on simple white paper:

According to legend, this was the most difficult scene to film in the nine seasons of the show. The ridiculousness of the situation (“it is a statement of fact,” Shrute said defending the sign) caused fits of laughter.

“IT IS YOUR BIRTHDAY” is the visual equivalent of most technical products I see.

I wrote about this problem in Technical Content Strategy Decoded, published in 2023 — before AI arrived to declare war on that em-dash and generate generic technical content at scale.

I’m still seeing the same mistakes, and AI tools like Claude are making them worse:

• Product-focused content lists features, but skips the benefit
• Articles avoid taking a stance
• Technical details pile up without context
• Content misses the reader’s actual skill level

You CAN avoid them, of course. You can spot them before you (or your team or Claude) write a single sentence—as long as you’re clear on how you want developers to know your product. What opinions does your product embody? How do these ideas attract the right developers and repel the wrong ones?

That’s positioning. Yours has gaps that AI can identify.

You’ve probably seen the way I’ve been digging into this publicly with LLM Rank. Privately, I’ve built reports for clients to help them identify and fill those positioning gaps.

I’m running a few of these custom reports for non-clients in mid-August. Want to see exactly where your positioning sits? Reports start at $499 and include a call with me. Tap a quick reply to let me know you’re interested.

A pen. A decoder badge. A pencil. A stack of narrow notepads.

Knowing something exists doesn’t mean I have to own it. And yet there I am, trolling eBay at odd hours for a small object that means far more than its size suggests.

Each one ended up here because it sparked a ​developer trust memo​. If you’ve been around for a while, some of these might look familiar:

• A Fisher Space Pen, which I first heard about from John Musser, founder of ProgrammableWeb, who picked it up from an old Marc Andreessen blog post. I ​debunked a common myth​ about it along the way.
• An Orphan Annie Secret Society Decoder Badge — the original 1935 badge. Ralphie had a 1940 in A Christmas Story, but I wanted the first one. Turns out ​Ralphie wasn’t the only one getting played​. I even built an ​encoding/decoding site​ around it.
• A Blackwing 602 pencil, a favorite of animators. Expensive and coveted on eBay. I’ve stuck with the reproduction — it looks just as nice, sharpens to a satisfying long point, and has that skinny eraser. Animators would swear they’re not the same, but ​the real reason they’re obsessed​ has nothing to do with the eraser.
• A stack of Reporter’s Notebooks. Not an eBay find — at $2-3 each, the long, narrow pad fits in a jacket or shirt pocket. There’s a reason ​every professional storyteller keeps one nearby​.

In case you think I buy every object I write about, I do not own:

• A ​Teddy Ruxpin​ – A ​torpedo bat​ – Whatever was ​“free” on Craigslist​

Developer lessons are everywhere — even in the things already sitting on your desk. If you’re having trouble spotting them in your own product, that’s exactly what we help with. ​Reach out to us​.

P.S. That’s right, Ralphie, it’s a crummy commercial.

But that was not how I felt the first time I saw a Rubik’s Cube.

I figured you either had the knack for it or you didn’t. Magic fingers, spatial reasoning I didn’t have, something like that. I kept that belief for years.

Then someone showed me the algorithms. There’s a method — a set of repeatable moves that work every time. It wasn’t magic. It was a process. I learned it in a weekend.

So when I came across a teenager arranging dozens of Rubik’s Cubes into a giant mosaic, I didn’t feel intimidated. I felt something closer to oh, I could do that.

She was making real-life pixel art. Because I’d solved a cube, I knew the trick she was using: you only have to get one side right. Each cube just needs to show the correct color on its face. The other five sides are irrelevant.

That’s when I ordered 100 mini Rubik’s Cubes:

One face of each cube has nine squares. 100 cubes give you 900 squares total. Arrange them into a 30×30 grid, and you have a canvas roughly the size of a large favicon — small, but enough to be recognizable if you plan it right.

The planning is where most of the work lives.

Before you touch a single cube, you take whatever you want to make — a Mario, a flower, a heart — and reduce it to a 30×30 image. Then you translate each of those 900 pixels into one of the colors a Rubik’s face can actually show. Then you map every individual cube: which of its nine squares needs to be which color, and which face needs to be facing out.

You’re writing a spec, then executing it one cube at a time.

With the Fourth of July approaching, I tried an American flag. Fifty stars, thirteen stripes. A lot of grid work and plotting before a single cube was solved.

It became the centerpiece of the table. All because I saw something and gave it a try.

Most of us in developer marketing are already experimenting with AI tools — using Claude to draft copy, maybe Nano Banana to create an image. That kind of thing.

But that’s using these tools for the work we do.

Developers are using them to build. They take something that doesn’t exist and figure out how to make it real. Sitting with an unclear prompt, iterating on something almost-right, feeling the small win when it finally works — that’s what your audience lives every day.

A lot of people take some downtime this time of year. If you get some, pick something you’d like to exist and see how close you can get with Lovable, Claude, or Cursor.

You’ll understand your developers a little better on the other side. (Something I can also help you with, BTW).

P.S. The flag is boxed in the closet. What should it become this year?

Incense cedar surrounds a firm graphite center. A flat metal cap clamps down over a thin pink eraser. It was a favorite of animators until it was discontinued. In 1998! That’s when a single pencil climbed to $40 or more on the secondary market. Another company eventually started reproducing them, but you can still find originals on eBay. Creators buy them up just to tap into that special something.

Disney animator Shamus Culhane, who led the original Snow White team, was buried with a Blackwing 602 in his hand.

That’s how much animators loved this pencil.

I had to get a few of the reproductions to see for myself:

If Shamus were still around, he could probably show me a thing or two with these things. How to extend the flat eraser with the built-in clip. How the weight sits in your hand on the thousandth frame of the day. Real tricks from someone who used the tool for decades.

But none of it would make me an animator.

I think about this a lot with developer tools. A great dev tool is still just a tool. The teams that win aren’t the ones with the shiniest API or the cleanest docs—they’re the ones who understand which use cases their tool is actually best for, and who can frame the product around those use cases in a way developers immediately recognize.

“I have logs scattered across three services and can’t trace a single request.”

“I need to test webhooks, but I can’t expose my local server to the internet.”

“Marketing wants full-text search across our content, and it’s all stored as Markdown now.”

That’s the language that makes a developer reach for a tool.

And now there’s a new wrinkle.

A lot of the time, the “developer” reaching for your tool is actually an LLM acting on a developer’s behalf. Which means the use cases you frame your product around aren’t just for humans anymore. They’re landing—or not missing—with the models that could recommend you.

The pencil doesn’t pick itself up. Something has to decide it’s the right one for the job. In animation, it was the Shamuses. In many dev workflows now, it’s Claude or Codex working from whatever impression they’ve formed of your product.

Which raises a pretty practical question: what impression have they formed?

​LLM Rank can tell you across 33 categories and counting, with the results recently updated every month. The leaderboards show which tools Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini recommend.

It’s the closest thing I’ve seen to a feedback loop on how AI currently understands your product—and whether it’s pointing the right developers your way.

I also wrote up some lessons learned from watching these leaderboards.

How are you tracking when you show up?

It was just one night. All I really needed was a bed, a shower, and electricity for all my devices.

I booked a hotel at Lombard and Van Ness, surrounded by the characteristic hills that make The City feel like nowhere else. When I got to my room, I found more USB charging spots than regular outlets. I was taking stock of this small victory when I looked out the window and

found an unexpected bonus.

The Golden Gate Bridge, in the distance.

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve seen it. Hundreds, easily. I grew up about fifty miles north. That bridge meant we were heading to the zoo, catching a flight, or sightseeing with out-of-town guests. Driving toward it meant we were almost somewhere.

Even though I live in a city with a dozen of bridges, the Golden Gate remains my favorite.

But after you’ve seen something hundreds of times, you get a bit desensitized. There was a familiar comfort looking at it from my hotel room — and not much else. That was the 388th time I’d seen it, give or take.

The 387th time hit different.

We were on one of our regular drives down to visit family in California. One of the days, bouncing between relatives’  houses, I realized something: we were only fifteen miles from the Golden Gate. And my kids had never seen it.

Their father’s supposed favorite bridge in the world, and they’d never seen it.

With everybody’s buy-in, I skipped the Novato turnoff and kept going south.

There’s a tunnel in Marin. It’s now named for Robin Williams. I’ve driven through it hundreds of times, too. As we approached, I announced to the car: “Tunnel!”

The kids knew exactly what to do. It’s something my mom taught me, and I passed on to them: hold your breath through the tunnel, then make a wish on the other side. They’ve done it on road trips more times than I can count. But never in this tunnel.

They didn’t know that this was the tunnel that started the whole tradition.

What was waiting on the other side was the biggest surprise of all.

On a clear day — and we had one — you come out of the Robin Williams Tunnel and the Golden Gate Bridge towers into view. There’s no buildup. It just appears.

I watched them see it for the first time.

I’ve driven across that bridge more times than I can remember. I know the color. I know the scale of the cables. I thought I knew everything about it. But that time, I noticed things I’d stopped seeing. The red seemed brighter than I’d ever remembered. Every cable felt worth examining. I was zoomed in on the details of a bridge I thought I knew completely.

That crossing was different from all the others, because I saw it through my children’s eyes.

This is the kind of clarity that could change the game for you and your team, too.

You’ve looked at your own product hundreds of times. You know how it works, what it does, the features that make it good. That familiarity is valuable — and it’s also exactly what makes it hard to see what a developer notices when they check out your tool.

EveryDeveloper has worked with more developer products than anyone. That helps us see your product the way a developer sees it — fresh eyes, first impressions, the details you’ve stopped noticing.

You want developers to find you, decide you’re worth checking out, and then get started successfully. That begins with knowing what they’re looking for and how they interpret what you’ve got.

You want to know what they see. We can help you get there.

Now is a good time to have a short conversation. No pressure, just a chance to see how we can bring some clarity.

Frequently, they’ll stay on my naughty list for several days, until the soreness has subsided. 

Yes, Romanian deadlifts and Bulgarian squats are some of the toughest exercises for my legs. Throw in Russian twists and Turkish get-ups, and my core will join to fight all of Eastern Europe. 

Each of these methods of gym torture is somehow named for its country. Does this mean everyone in Romania walks around with sore hamstrings? Do they even know about regular deadlifts? 

There are plenty of countries known for specific things, often food: 

– The French have toast, fries, and dressing (though probably not all at once)

– Italians also have a dressing, plus their unforgettable sausage

– In Spain, you’ve got the rice and the omelet

– The English ONLY get muffins 

Things get pretty crazy when you start to mix them, as I did at the gym. 

Is it possible to wear a Hawaiian shirt, Bermuda shorts, and a Panama hat? Yes, but it’s not exactly stylish: 

Just don’t wear them inside near Venetian blinds or a Persian rug. 

Some of these many things named for places may be the actual origin, or possibly a misperception. Either way, they stuck. That’s just good branding, even if it’s accidental. 

You can’t always decide what you’re known for, and you don’t always have to embrace it. 

(Every souvenir shop in Stockholm long ago gave up and sells Swiss Army Knives, even though Sweden and Switzerland are, you know, different countries altogether). 

Even if nothing has yet been named after your dev tool, you’d better figure out how you’re known. 

We now have some of the best tools ever to identify this kind of collective wisdom. Have a chat with AI and get a pretty good idea of what devs have shared publicly about your product or competitors. 

What are the ways where you are top of mind? And how about where you don’t show up at all? 

Identify these gaps and you can use them. For the things that match your strengths, you can lean into and encourage the association. On the other hand, if you don’t like what you see, you can try to change the perception. 

You want your brand to be more Swiss watch (reliable and precise) than Swiss cheese (full of holes!) 

First, you need to know where you stand: to start, see if your category is already listed on LLM Rank.fyi

Yet, one of her first roles crowns the “known for” section of her IMDB page.

Ricci played Wednesday Addams (no relation) in the 1991 Addams Family movie. She was given the best line, delivered beautifully, when she clapped back at the sassy Girl Scout.

While my daughter is not as brazen as either of these characters, she does don the sash and stand outside of stores with cookies. She doesn’t trade for lemonade or any other treat besides cold hard cash. Ok, it’s mostly Venmo.

Don’t get me wrong, she loves lemonade. But she has bills to pay!

For several months each year, we operate a cookie warehouse.

Her bedroom floor is stacked several cases high with the Girl Scouts’ most famous products during cookie season. When a box is sold in person, she takes the $ from the customer ($6 in our area) and hands them the goods.

That’s one less box in our house and $6 less that we’ll personally have to pay to the regional chapter. That’s right, individual scouts (or, let’s be real, their parents) are on the hook for everything in their own little warehouse!

At the start of every cookie season, my daughter sets a goal for the number of boxes to sell. Then the troop makes the order for her, right down to how many Thin Mints and Peanut Butter Patties to get. The Girl Scouts regional chapter has a contract with one of two bakers, who then deliver the cookies.

Thankfully, no money has changed hands yet at this point (have you ever asked 10-year-olds for thousands of dollars?). But the countdown starts, because twice per season, the regional chapter slurps half the cost of the entire cookie order from the troop’s account. It is a fundraiser for the troop, so they only take back $5 per box. That has to come from

somewhere: either the troops sell their boxes, or parents foot the bill.

The parents who shill their kid’s cookie sale? They’re trying not to get left with an edible debt.

(Don’t worry, no ask from me—cookie season is over here).

But here’s how my daughter’s bedroom floor looked not too long ago:

Duringcookie mania time, accounting can be hard to grasp. Neighbors are Venmoing parents and relatives are writing checks. The kitchen drawer is chock full of fives and ones.

During a February rainstorm in front of a supermarket, girls make change as the wind flaps their tent, and you sure hope their 5th-grade math is right.

When everything settles, all the accounting makes sense. But in the moment, it feels like craziness.

It can be difficult to make good decisions when you’re surrounded by uncertainty. I think that’s why the Girl Scouts tries to make it super simple for the kids: one box, six bucks.

Lucky for us in the technology industry, the present and future are crystal clear, right?

Hardly! Things have always moved fast, but the last few years especially so. AI is changing how everyone works, including how developers build software. There are so many new tools, it’s hard to know where to start. And if you’re a marketer for one of those tools, it’s tough to figure out how to be found.

When it feels like things are swirling around you, it’s hard to figure out where things are headed.

One thing that’s helped me is my recent research into how devs use LLMs in their workflow. After collecting data on 30+ categories of dev tools, I decided to release it for free as LLM Rank.fyi.

You’ll find leaderboards that show how GPT-5 recommends each category. You can also see how each dev tool’s place has changed since GPT-4.

The positions themselves aren’t nearly as interesting as the differences: between models or from one use case to another. Small changes in language can impact what tools get recommended. We use these with clients to help them get a sense of the current state and the trajectory. With a little grounding, you can then start to explore gaps more meaningfully, even as

uncertainty swirls around you.

It comes back to something I’ve been saying for a long time: the words developers use unlock a lot of potential. You’ll find one-box-six-bucks kind of clarity by following their language.

And “language” is one of the Ls in LLM.

Check out LLM Rank and let me know what you find. We have way more data than what’s there, including more categories and Models. I’m  happy to share if you ask.

She’d give in, buy the Fruity Pebbles, but that wouldn’t be the end of it. When we get back to her house, she’d help me pour the entire contents into her largest bowl. Then, together we’d fish out whatever junky toy was advertised.

The best of these freebies required more planning. I’d need to collect multiple proofs of purchase, then send them in an envelope to a special address. An interminable six to eight weeks later, the object would arrive, usually around the time I’d finally forgotten about it.

These physical giveaways have basically disappeared in the modern times. A popular movie burned them into my memory, though it takes place WAY before my time.

Ralphie is a kid growing up in the 1940s, obsessed with his favorite radio show. Little Orphan Annie has been teasing something special: a secret decoder ring, available in exchange for the gold-colored seals from chocolate Ovaltine.

Every day he checks the mailbox. Nothing. Then finally, the package. He tears it open, listens to the show with the intensity of someone defusing a bomb, scribbles down the numbers, and locks himself in the bathroom (which, for a kid in that house, is basically a secure facility).

Listening to the secret code on the radio program, he prepares to decode the message. You can follow along with Ralphie if you buy your own on eBay (for quite a bit more than those proofs of purchase):

In the movie, he works through every number. Translates each to a letter. And reads what he’s got:

BE SURE TO DRINK YOUR OVALTINE

Both Ralphie and the audience feel it. All that anticipation, all that excitemnent. For a sales message.

“A crummy commercial.”

Developers have decoded a lot of messages like that. They’ve been Ralphie. They know the feeling.

So by the time they land on your product page, they’re not reading with open arms. They’re watching for the moment the message turns. And when they see “Book a Demo” before they even know if you solve their problem—before they know what the product actually does—they’ve already decoded it.

Crummy commercial.

The hard part is that many dev tools start from their specific solution. Their product.

If you’ve read one of my books, this isn’t news. But it’s actually more true now than when they were published.

The fix isn’t to hide the product. It’s to earn the moment. Start from what a developer is actually trying to accomplish. Help them get there.

That’s the currency that buys trust with developers.

It also happens to be how they find you now. Developers aren’t typing your product name into Claude. They’re describing a problem they’re trying to solve. The tools that show up are the ones that have spent time speaking developer—not the ones that spent time optimizing for their own preferred framing.

LLM Rank shows you how dev tools actually appear in AI, based on the way developers really search. Not how you wish they’d find you.

Then CEO of Microsoft, the guy was ahead of his time. Two and a half decades later, we know how developers feel about open source:

It’s a pain to install, maintain, and run. Closed source is safer and more scalable. They’d much rather have no control over the software they rely on. And the best part? They never have to see the code.

If open source doesn’t do what you want, you might have to try to fix it yourself. That’s like a riddle that must be solved. Since they are naturally incurious, ​developers hate puzzles​.

Anyone who cries “vendor lock-in” hasn’t handled migrations. Closed source means you never have to switch services. Because you can’t.

Open source means community consensus. That sounds exhausting and inefficient.

Developers prefer to be told what their software will do. “Any color you want, as long as it’s black” worked at Ford in the early 1900s. It’s timeless.

Steve Ballmer saw all of this coming. He also gave the ​restrained oration​ known as “Ode to Engineers.”

And if you believe any of that, please know it was all written on April Fool’s Day.

Open source is how developers learn, build, and decide whether to trust a product.

Have you seen all the interest in OpenClaw? Major emphasis on the “Open.”

When developers search for tools, we found they ​frequently look for open source​.

Even as AI takes center stage in developer workflows, open source remains vital. If anything, open source matters more now: while most LLMs are closed, the tools developers use to interact with models are often open source.

If your product is closed source, developers will still expect you to understand how open source fits into their world. Show them that, and your product fits too.

Happy April Fool’s Day. Now go star a repo!

No, it’s about the big blue and yellow buildings where you visit the company’s many products.

You are greeted with an escalator straight to the showroom when you walk in the doors. It’s like there’s an invisible river pushing you in this singular direction. And those rapids continue to carry you once upstairs:

You’ll move from living rooms to offices to kitchens to dinings…

Unless you grasp something growing on the banks and hurl yourself through one of those “shortcuts,” you’re going the longcut.

In each of these areas, you’ll find numerous examples of IKEA products in action. You’ll see combinations of rugs, coffee tables and accent chairs. There are low cabinets with massive fake flat-screen televisions. I’ve walked through multiple teeny, tiny, fully-furnished apartments that feel roomier than they should — because they have no ceilings!

IKEA transforms the top floor of its enormous store into thousands of use cases for its baggebos and orreslätts.

With these ideas swirling in your head, you walk down the stairs to the warehouse. You grab a cart and begin to implement some of what you witnessed upstairs. If the showroom is a river, natural and smooth, the warehouse is a manmade structure tuned to efficiency.

The warehouse is made of aisles, each with numbers and labels. Go only where your products are stored and heft the appropriate box into your cart.

Then move on!

At this point, you’re ready. You’ve already imagined your new bedroom or workspace. Now you merely need to collect all the right parts to make it happen.

IKEA is a dev tool that can make modern interiors.

And it’s a layout lesson you can apply to how you present your own actual dev tools.

So much attention is given to documentation, but that’s just the warehouse. It’s the last step, once someone already knows exactly what they’re building.

Could you improve your docs? Sure, probably.

For the vast majority of dev tools, there’s a lot more to build out in your showroom: where you inspire developers with the possibilities, share complete examples, and outline the many use cases they’ll be able to build once they get down to the warehouse.

Increasingly, your showroom has another audience: LLMs being trained on your capabilities. Use cases factor into every stage of the developer journey.

You want to inspire developers directly, and also the bots who will later inspire more of those developers.

Everywhere you look, there’s a well-known monolith, monument, or memorial. Though not towering above the city, the Jefferson Memorial is nevertheless spectacular:

It was inspired by the University of Virginia’s rotunda, which Jefferson himself designed. Of course, the third president (and Hamilton star) was influenced by the Pantheon in Rome.

Jefferson was a deep thinker and a voracious reader. It’s no surprise that he pulled inspiration from all over. In fact, it seems like he never adopted another’s wisdom wholesale. He’d take the parts he liked and leave the parts he didn’t.

Perhaps his most famous work, the Declaration of Independence, was based on the Virginia Declaration of Rights by George Mason. Jefferson kept the “natural rights” in his draft and left the rest for James Madison’s Bill of Rights.

Jefferson took a razor, literally, to various Bibles to compile what is now known as the Jefferson Bible:

As he read commonplace books, as he called them, he’d routinely copy his favorite passages by hand, creating his own personal Bartlett’s before John Bartlett was even born.

The wisdom of Thomas Jefferson, it turns out, is the wisdom of many, many others.

And so it is for many things, including the ways you engage with developers. There’s not a single playbook that you grab off a shelf. Even ​my developer marketing book​ is more philosophy than activity.

That’s why you’ll often see me sharing examples from many different dev tools, APIs, and technical products. There’s something to take away from anyone, even if it’s something you know you want to avoid.

Don’t be afraid to get out your razor and go TJ on that “best practice.” Make it your own. Fit it to your developer audience. Create the “You Bible.”

But I spent many precious postage stamps on it as a child.

Before I tell you what TTM means, here’s one more acronym you’re more likely to recognize:

ICYMI (In Case You Missed It): You can have EveryDeveloper analyze how AI helps devs find and adopt your product. It’s called the ​LLM Reach Assessment​. Give us a week, and we’ll return an AI visibility report.

Meanwhile, pitchers and catchers are reporting to play spring training baseball in Arizona and Florida. The ballparks are much smaller, providing an opportunity for close interaction. And autographs. That means fans and collectors will carry a variety of souvenirs and extra pens to these games.

As a kid, I never went to spring training. Even if I attended a regular game, we always sat a great distance away from the action.

Yet I managed to collect many autographs. Often duplicates from the same person. Looking through my binder as an adult is a little bit embarrassing:

I imagine the guy getting a stack of cards from me, then signing them as he wonders why this kid needs so many! Nevertheless, once I started to collect them, I was addicted.

Here’s how it worked…

1. Choose cards, ones I’m not worried about losing forever
2. Write a note of praise and fandom to the player represented on the cards
3. Include an envelope, pre-addressed to me, with a stamp already affixed

Then I’d stuff those three things into another envelope addressed to the player’s team with “ATTN: Player Name” on the envelope. I stuck a stamp on that one, too, and prayed it would all return to me.

The wait would often be weeks. I had no idea whether my letter had been delivered, if the player had seen it, or when my cards were signed.

But for the cost of two stamps, plus the cards, I might get some signatures in return! Eventually!

I’ve learned this practice continues today, with people sharing addresses and success rates for their through-the-mail (TTM) autograph collecting.

And that’s what recently brought me to my mailbox to open a return from Ron Hassey, the one-time backup catcher for the long-ago World Series-winning Oakland A’s.

I recognized the envelope, addressed to me in my own handwriting.

Even though I already had several of his cards autographed, I’d found some from his earlier playing days. Maybe he’d even reply to my letter, likely a rarity in his retirement, and we’d become old-fashioned pen pals!

I carefully tore the edge of the thick envelope and emptied its contents to the table:

Inside were two unsigned cards and a piece of paper with a printed message:

I am sorry I cannot sign, I am under contract with PastPros. Please contact them for autograph submission. Thank you!

What a disappointment, Ronald!

Apparently, there’s enough interest in the only person to catch two perfect games that he prints up little slips of paper to vex his fans.

I’m not suggesting he owed me anything different, but I also think you can improve upon this experience when you engage developers.

More than ever, you don’t have much insight into that first impression… You can’t even print out notes to pass along.

Today, that “note” is increasingly coming from an LLM.

Do you know what it says about you? How about your competitors? When are you found, when are you invisible, and how well do the popular models know your product?

We answer these questions in the ​LLM Reach Assessment​, delivered much, much faster than TTM autographs.

Regret. It emanates from anyone who ordered the burger or burrito or, oh my gosh, the garden salad.

The fajita sizzle is loud. It’s in your face. It’s designed to be noticed.

It’s also rarely the sort of splash you’d want to make with devs.

Recently, I ordered a personal shakshuka at a local brunch place. It arrived with its own sizzle:

There was no parade. Even in a small, cozy cafe, nobody but me noticed the shakshuka show.

And yet… You see those bubbles?​

My cast-iron dish was nearly as hot. And my taste buds are nearly as excited.​

(My bright white shirt, on the other hand… maybe not the best pairing!)​

That’s the kind of sizzle you want most of the time with developers.

Fajita sizzle? More likely to look like marketing. Developers will be skeptical. And they’ll share their uncertainty. Shakshuka sizzle? That looks like speaking to their problems… surprising devs by reading their minds.​

They’ll share that, too.​

And these days, “word of mouth” doesn’t just hit the ears of other developers. LLMs are trained on it. Then it shows up as other devs ask AI for help.​

Do you know how your product shows up when users ask AI?​

Do you know how to add the right kind of sizzle to stoke the dev community?​

I’m working on something new to give you visibility and guidance in these crazy times.

Tap a quick reply and I’ll tell you about it.

(That’s not my dog, but ​Kenji Joy on Instagram​ is worth a follow for other Schnauzer lovers)

Going for walks, my pup would run through the brambles and bushes. Then she’d bring back dozens of burrs from the weeds, each embedded in her American Kennel Club haircut. One time, it got so bad that we had to shave off the trademark beard. She looked like a completely different dog.

Decades before my Schnauzer picked up barbed tourists in the fields, a Swiss dog owner noticed the same phenomenon. He’d go on to invent Velcro from his discovery.

Accidental invention stories are everywhere, from Post-Its and Super Glue to Corn Flakes and Popsicles.

These are what Bob Ross might have called “​happy accidents​.”

My career has been a bit like this. I’m a developer who likes to share what I learned with others. From writing tutorials, I transitioned to journalism, reporting on the technology acronym of the early 2010s, APIs.

I’d track trends, make sense of new tools, and help developers understand why they mattered. At some point, I realized ​dev tool marketing should be more like tech journalism​.

And that’s when I became an accidental marketer.

For the past seven years, I’ve led a group of technical communicators who track the trends, make sense of new tools, and help developers understand why our clients’ products matter. (Sound familiar?)

We’ve recently ​looked at LLM discovery​ and continue to explore what that means for the companies we work with and the developers they want to reach.

Don’t go running off alone in the brambles and bushes. We may have ended up here by accident, but we’ve seen some of the thorniest spots along the way, and ​we can help you navigate them​.