Content Is Code - Matt Palmer, Conductor
Matt Palmer discusses how code, empowered by AI, is becoming the fastest and most efficient medium for technical content creation, emphasizing that while code is cheap, structure and conscientiousness are now the most valuable assets for producing high-quality output. He predicts the rise of "content engineers" who leverage declarative pipelines to automate technical communication.
The Rise of Code as the Fastest Medium for Technical Content
Matt Palmer, a DevRel & product leader at Conductor, argues that code is increasingly becoming the most effective and rapid medium for technical communication. He challenges the traditional approaches to content creation, positing that while choosing a medium has historically been difficult and skill-dependent, the landscape is now transforming.
Defining Technical Content in a Code-First World
Palmer defines “content” broadly as technical communication that clarifies what problem a product solves. This encompasses a wide array of assets:
- Documentation (e.g., covering every detail of a framework)
- Changelogs (timely, robust, and often overlooked due to the complexity of accurately tracking product changes)
- Product updates (emails summarizing changes over time)
- Product tours (dynamic, interactive experiences rather than static screenshots)
- Videos and video overlays (adding engaging material or even generating entire videos via code)
He provides a concrete example from Conductor, where a product tour was entirely rebuilt using React and Remotion, illustrating how entire product surfaces and videos could soon be code-generated.
The Three Eras of Content Creation
Palmer delineates the evolution of content creation into three distinct eras:
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Era 1: The Handcrafted Era (Manual and Expensive):
- Content creation was manual, relying heavily on time, money, and specialized human skill.
- Organizations sought external experts or agencies for high-fidelity assets like motion graphics.
- This era was characterized by significant bottlenecks in production and quality.
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Era 2: The Expensive Code Era (Engineering as Bottleneck):
- Code and cloud technologies matured, but professional software engineers became the bottleneck for content creation.
- Tasks like building robust documentation or a sophisticated website required highly paid engineers.
- Content was often deprioritized because engineering resources were allocated to core product development.
- Frameworks like Remotion struggled to gain widespread adoption due to the scarcity of dedicated “content engineers.”
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Era 3: The Cheap Code Era (Today, with AI):
- The advent of AI (e.g., Anthropic, OpenAI) has drastically reduced the cost of generating code and various assets.
- Users can now prototype videos, websites, slides, images, and documentation rapidly through code or AI-driven code generation.
- Palmer notes that his preferred medium for creating ancillary assets for presentations, apart from speaking, is now TypeScript and React—a statement he finds “wild” given his background. While not all AI-generated content is perfect, an engineering mindset and understanding of systems enable high-quality output.
The New Value: Structure and Conscientiousness
With code becoming inexpensive, Palmer argues that structure emerges as the new valuable and expensive commodity, rather than “taste.” This involves:
- Maintaining a highly structured codebase.
- Adhering to consistent brand guidelines and design tokens.
- Ensuring clean and well-documented pull requests (PRs) with clear feature/bug definitions and proper tagging.
- Cultivating accurate internal documentation that empowers anyone to achieve tasks.
He defines conscientiousness as “the quality of being meticulous, careful, and guided by a strong sense of moral or professional duty.” This meticulousness and care, rather than inherent technical skill or intelligence, is what AI rewards. Ultimately, AI rewards organizational excellence, conscientiousness, and structure, distinguishing professional, polished outcomes from “AI purple gradient slop.”
The “Shift Left” to Content Engineering
Palmer concludes that a “shift left” movement is occurring, where content is moving closer to the codebase, making code the ultimate source of truth. This necessitates a structured and conscientiously managed codebase to effectively generate content. He predicts that:
- The highest-performing and best-communicating teams will be those that instill discipline and rigor into their software creation process, thereby enabling content engineering.
- While 2026 was the year of the “creative technologist,” 2027 will be the year of the “content engineer.”
- Future content pipelines will be declarative and robust, capable of automating the creation of walkthroughs, documentation, screenshots, and product updates—all enabled by code (e.g., React) and AI.