It’s no secret that AI has flooded our timelines everywhere, and here at daily dev too. Heck, we’re even working to throttle it down a little algorithmically.
I wanted to dig into our data and see if it’s actually what developers read. If so much content is being published about it, then people are probably reading it, right? I’m guessing you thought the same as me. Yesterday I ran a <a href="https://daily.dev/posts/U54Kl9ohS" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">poll here</a>, and 55% out of 720 people, voted AI as the most read topic on daily dev.
So I rolled up my sleeves, sat down, opened the BigQuery console, and started writing good old SQL (joking, Claude wrote the query). After a couple of iterations to find the right metric, I settled on comparing each topic’s share of posts published against its share of reading, so the sheer size of a topic doesn’t skew the result. Voilà:
<img src="https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--XS4utT0A--/f_auto/v1784544852/ugc/content_92d4003d-d4d0-4758-b20f-2e53f82aa86d?_a=BAMAMicg0" alt="published_vs_read.png">
As you can see, the winner is actually JavaScript, at a ratio of 2.6 reads for every post published. AI sits at 1 at best. It’s still get read but not remotely closed to what you may think.
So don’t buy the hype. Be you, read what you love, and don’t give a f*** about what they’re trying to sell you. Until next time!

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A data-driven look at what developers actually read on daily.dev reveals that JavaScript content gets 2.6 reads per post published, far outpacing AI content which sits at roughly a 1:1 ratio. Despite AI dominating content volume and developer perception (55% of poll respondents guessed AI was the most-read topic), the numbers tell a different story. The analysis used BigQuery SQL to compare each topic's share of posts published against its share of reading to normalize for topic size.

AI is everywhere, but is it really what we read the most?

I like to read posts that actually required the creator to do actual research and get practical, no matter the topic.
A post where the creator actually ran tests, presents their own real data/experience about the topic beats a “Write a blogpost about this mdn article, add a practical example” any day.

Finally, people are getting back to the important things. For a while these past few years, it felt like everyone was rushing to read content about AI, and the old posts about programming languages and system design had disappeared. But I think people are starting to realize that AI is just a tool. No matter how much you get out of it, you still need to master the fundamentals, and you can’t let it own your code or your project.

I can’t believe so many people are still posting and reading about PHP!

I am glad to discover this chart, it’s been a few weeks I was wondering about the share of reading by topics! Thanks for sharing.
Very interesting, I was expecting mush more readers for tech news and Python. Guess that depending on the dev profile, you might prefer different platform/source of information?
Actually as a web developer I obviously read a lot about that, but I still appreciate to read at least the titles on topics out of my usual ones. It keeps me informed (or at least used to some vocabulary) about the whole tech state and state of mind. And, time to time, I get curious about some article and dive into it. So even if some topics get underread, I think it is still important to have people sharing about them. Thank you everyone for making this place so active and diverse! I learn a lot from that.

AI fatigue is so real. Glad to see actual data showing devs just want to solve real problems with JavaScript