The Scenario
A developer relations manager's team just published a framework comparison article that went unexpectedly viral on DEV Community. It's sitting at 300+ comments. Her VP wants a sentiment breakdown for next week's engineering leadership meeting: roughly how many comments are positive, how many are critical, how many are questions. Nobody on the team has time to read 300 comments.
She opens the DEV article. The comments load in batches. Nested replies don't expand automatically. She starts reading.
The bad version:
- Scroll down to load comments one batch at a time. Manually copy the comment text, author, and timestamp into the workbook. Try to track which replies belong to which parent comment.
- Realize around comment 80 that you've been copying the same nested thread twice because the expand/collapse state keeps resetting.
- Get to comment 150 and decide to stop because the meeting is in two hours and you have a rough enough picture.
A 150-comment sample doesn't tell you what the full thread actually contains. But 300 comments, copied by hand, is a project, not a task.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It connects to the Dev.to API and pulls all comments for any article — including nested replies — into your workbook in one pass, with author, timestamp, and like count for each.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and paste:
Fetch all comments for DEV Community article ID 1234567 and write each comment to the CommentAnalysis worksheet — author username in column A, comment body in column B, created_at timestamp in column C, like_count in column D. Include nested replies as separate rows. Sort by created_at ascending.
What You Get
- One row per comment, including nested replies, in CommentAnalysis.
- Columns A–D populated with author, body text, timestamp, and like count.
- Sorted chronologically so the conversation thread is readable top to bottom.
- No comment missed — the API returns the full tree regardless of how DEV's interface loads them.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
You want to identify the article by URL rather than ID
You have the article URL, not the article ID. DEV's API accepts article path slugs.
Fetch all comments for the DEV Community article at path 'mycompany/how-we-scaled-our-api' and write them to CommentAnalysis — author in A, body in B, timestamp in C, likes in D. Include nested replies.
You want to classify comments by sentiment automatically
After pulling the comments, you want each one tagged as positive, critical, or question before the meeting.
Fetch all comments for DEV article ID 1234567 into CommentAnalysis — author in A, body in B, timestamp in C, likes in D. After writing all rows, add a classification in column E: "positive" if the tone is generally favorable, "critical" if it raises concerns or objections, "question" if it's primarily asking something. Then add a summary row at the bottom with counts for each category.
You only want top-level comments, not nested replies
The leadership summary just needs the primary responses, not the sub-threads.
Fetch top-level comments only (no nested replies) for DEV article ID 1234567 and write them to CommentAnalysis — author in A, body in B, created_at in C, like_count in D. Skip child replies entirely.
Pull comments, classify, rank the most-liked, and build a summary table
You want the full thread, a sentiment classification, the top 10 comments by likes ranked, and a per-author breakdown showing who generated the most discussion.
Fetch all comments for DEV article ID 1234567 into CommentAnalysis — author in A, body in B, timestamp in C, likes in D. Classify each comment in column E as positive, critical, or question. In a separate TopComments worksheet, list the top 10 rows by likes. In a third worksheet AuthorActivity, list each unique author with their comment count and total likes received.
Running that once gives the leadership team three views of the conversation — raw data, ranked highlights, and contributor breakdown — all from one prompt.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open an Excel workbook where you want to analyze a DEV Community thread — paste the article ID, then ask SheetXAI to pull every comment with sentiment classifications already applied. The Dev.to integration is included in every SheetXAI plan.
See also: Research a Dev.to user's articles into an Excel workbook and the Dev.to integration hub.