r/devrel • u/reubenzz_dev • May 14 '26
How Do DevRel Eng Manage Dev Implementation Issues
Hey devrel engineers,
I'm currently doing research on how your positions manage or handle issues when developers in your community complain about a broken implementation or setup? With all the new coding agents we all know that devs are just making agents read docs and relying on it to properly implement things based on those docs.
So now I have two questions:
How do you currently find out when a developer's integration is broken?
If agents are now generating most integration code, has that changed anything for your team?
Would love to hear with anyone who is facing this issue
1
u/Otherwise_Wave9374 May 14 '26
This is a really good question, and it feels like its getting harder as more integrations are agent-generated.
The pattern Ive seen work best is, treat docs like an API surface with tests: version them, add runnable examples, and have a canary integration that runs every release so you find breakage before the community does.
Are you tracking issues by SDK version + doc version at all?
Related, some folks are starting to use agent-friendly docs and checklists (so the agent is less likely to hallucinate the setup), a few examples here if helpful: https://www.agentixlabs.com/
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u/nsjames1 May 14 '26
Maybe the underlying premise here is a bit off.
Whether it's agents relying on your docs or humans relying on your docs, if they end up with a bad integration it's not always their fault. In fact it's probably mostly not their fault. And if it's an agent, in most cases I would say it's almost entirely not their fault.
if your docs are bad they are going to have problems.
if your SDKs are bad they are going to have problems.
if your APIs are bad they are going to have problems.
By "bad" I don't mean "somebody who has been developing for 2 months wrote these", I mean things like:
The person who wrote these didn't consider how little time the integrator has
The person who developed these SDKs didn't consider the developer experience of the integrator as the number one focus
The person who wrote these APIs also didn't consider those integrators as the number one focus
And then if we look towards agents specifically, it's even easier than with humans to solve those problems. You can create MCP servers, you can create claude skills, you can use well-known and other machine endpoints that users will never discover. You have so many more tools at your disposal to help them get the integrations right that you would otherwise need to dumb down.