Once upon a time, I knew a guy named "Vector." Vector ran a solid dev-tool startup. He had a great product, a loyal customer base, and a predictable revenue stream. Then, AI coding assistants went mainstream, and his business model got absolutely cooked.
How? The classic dev-tool playbook used to be simple: build a great tool, write excellent documentation, rank high on Google, and convert those doc-readers into paying users. But today, AI is doing the heavy lifting. Developers aren't visiting Vector's docs anymore; their AI is just reading the API specs, writing the implementation, and skipping the website entirely. No site visits means no funnel, and no funnel means no sales.
This isn't just a spooky campfire story for founders. It’s already playing out in the real world. Just look at the recent drama surrounding Tailwind CSS. Word on the street is they had to lay off staff because they couldn’t retain the revenue previously driven by their highly-trafficked documentation site. As AI models ingested their docs, developers no longer needed to visit the site to look up class names. The irony? Tailwind actively enabled this by merging PR #2388—adding an llms.txt endpoint specifically for LLM-optimized documentation. Adam Wathan even touched on this shifting landscape in his "Morning Walk" update.
Dev-tool startups are actively cheering for llms.txt. They think they are providing perfect, frictionless DX by letting developers get answers without leaving their IDE chat window. What they are actually doing is slowly strangling their own top-of-funnel traffic.
And it gets worse. The rise of "vibe coding" means developers are putting in zero effort to discover new libraries. If your tool isn't already baked into the LLM's default training weights, you don't exist.
Is There a Way Out?
There might not be a silver-bullet fix for this yet, but rolling over isn't an option. If you want your dev-tool to survive the AI squeeze, you have two harsh but necessary pivots to make.
First, you have to make your documentation more than just text. It needs to be an interactive playground. If your docs are just markdown reference material, the LLM will steal it. But if your docs offer a visual, interactive sandbox that a chat window simply cannot replicate, developers will actually click the link.
Second, it might be time to start closing the gap on that overly generous free tier. Shrinking the free tier is going to hurt your user numbers, and people will complain. But if your organic traffic is already bleeding out to AI wrappers, prioritizing actual, paying customers is a lot less painful than running out of runway.