@LorenzoARK: Monthly developer count in crypto fell, AI makes it irrelevant

New monthly developer count in crypto just fell to levels not seen since 2017. One of the metrics we have always preached in crypto and I think is going to be completely irrelevant very quickly is the developers activity or count. Back in the day this was really important to understand an L1/L2 health. Historically, developer count and activity mattered because writing code was expensive. If a chain had a lot of real developers shipping wallets, protocols, tooling, SDKs, infra, and apps, that usually meant there was genuine mindshare, and experimentation. It was an imperfect metric, but it was still a decent proxy for how much human capital was committed to the ecosystem. First, code generation is essentially free. One developer can now produce the output that previously required several people. So a lower developer count may not mean a weaker ecosystem at all. You could have fewer developers producing better products. So with AI, developer activity becomes less useful as a health metric because it stops being a scarce input. When something becomes cheap and abundant, it usually loses value as a signal. Crypto is open source. We don’t need millions of developers all rewriting the same thing to build new products. Smart contracts were always meant to be capital- and human-efficient. Curious what the folks at @electriccapital @avichal think