Developer Relations Has Changed. Introducing AXRank.ai.
As AI agents reshape how developers discover and build on services, a new metric emerges to measure what actually works: Agent Experience, or AX.
For most of my career, Developer Relations meant one thing: help developers succeed. Tutorials, talks, office hours, documentation reviews, hackathons at 2am. The job was to lower the barrier between a developer's problem and the moment it clicked.
At Twilio we called those "magic moments" — the first successful API call, the first working integration, the README that actually answered your question. Magic moments don't happen by accident. They take a team obsessing over every step of the developer journey.
Working with developer-first companies for years — Twilio, Heroku, Postman, Salesforce — I kept coming back to the same question: what separates the developer surfaces that builders actually reach for from the ones that get abandoned after the first 404? The answer was always the same. Docs that anticipate the right questions. APIs that behave predictably. Error messages that tell you what to do next. SDKs that feel like they were written by someone who had to use them.
Then something shifted.
A few months ago I wrote about the rise of Agent Relations. Developers now work alongside coding agents, research assistants, and AI-powered tooling that mediates how they discover, evaluate, and build on services. DevRel teams are suddenly writing for two audiences at once. Human developers respond to narrative and connection. The agentic layer responds to structure, completeness, and machine readability. Mathias Biilmann framed this well in Introducing AX: UX → DX → AX. User experience, developer experience, agent experience. Each one named a new class of user platforms had to consciously design for.
You cannot inspire an agent. But you can build a surface so clear that when an agent is helping a developer solve a problem, your service becomes the obvious answer.
The response to my Agent Relations post surprised me. People were feeling it too. The question had shifted from "how do we get a developer's attention?" to "how does an agent have a good experience using our product surface?" But nobody had a way to measure it.
So I did what any developer does, I built one. I call it AXRank.
The premise is straightforward. Give AXRank a root URL. It discovers your developer surface the same way an agent would — crawling docs, listing MCP tools, fetching OpenAPI specs, running CLIs. Then it generates realistic builder tasks: make an API call, invoke an MCP tool, authenticate and retrieve a resource, handle an error correctly. Multiple frontier models attempt each task. An LLM-as-judge grades the results. Failures get classified into one of 18 failure-mode categories.
Spoiler: most services have more gaps than they think.
The DX flywheel I've watched spin for years works differently now. Great developer experience used to compound through community content — a developer has a good experience, builds something, writes about it, and the next developer finds that signal. That loop still runs.
Now there's a second loop running faster and wider. Agents consume your developer surface directly. When they succeed, developers build on your service. When they fail, developers get stuck and go somewhere else — and the agent that failed them updates its recommendations accordingly. You don't get a support ticket. You just quietly stop being recommended. AXRank includes an MCP server that your agent can ask recommendations for the best tool.
How do you improve your service? AXRank provides comprehensive insights, available in markdown, that you can use directly to continuously improve the developer and agent experience of your product.
That's where I'm leaning in. DevRel still means helping developers succeed. It just means designing for the agents working alongside them too. I'll keep adding evals for services over time. Each eval costs real money for me and burns a lot of tokens across OpenAI and Anthropic Claude , so until more companies claim their service or sponsor, bear with me. Today I started with some of my favorite services: Linear , Postman , and WorkOS . More on the way!
Go check your rank. You might be surprised.
AXRank — Agent Experience, graded.