The FDE Coach blog · new articles every day
Practical guides for engineers who ship AI.
Step-by-step builds with free AI tools, what just shipped in AI and why it matters, and Forward Deployed Engineer playbooks on interviews, pay and client work.
Step-by-step builds using free AI tools & LLMs.
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Build Guides
Build a GitHub PR Review Bot with Groq + Local Ollama Fallback
Ship a free-tier GitHub App that posts inline diff comments using Groq's fast LLMs, with a local Ollama fallback for sensitive repos. Full Cloudflare Worker code included.
10 min read
Build Guides
Automate Daily Slack Channel Summaries with n8n and Groq’s Free Tier
Build a zero-cost n8n workflow that fetches yesterday's Slack messages, runs them through Groq's free Mixtral model, and posts a clean digest back to a channel every morning.
10 min read
Build Guides
Build a Smart Clipboard That Summarizes and Translates with Cloudflare Workers AI
Build a zero-cost desktop utility that watches your clipboard and uses Llama 3 on Cloudflare Workers AI to summarize or translate any copied text with a single hotkey.
9 min read
Build Guides
Build a YouTube-to-Blog Repurposing Agent with Groq Llama 3 and LlamaIndex
Turn any YouTube video into a structured blog post in under 5 minutes. We use Groq's free Llama 3 API, LlamaIndex for chunking, and pure Python to extract transcripts and generate SEO-ready drafts.
11 min read
Build Guides
Build a Codebase Q&A Bot with Gemini RAG and LlamaIndex for Free
Ingest a local repo, index it with LlamaIndex and ChromaDB, and ask natural-language questions using Google Gemini's free tier. Full CLI build guide with code, pitfalls, and extensions.
10 min read
Build Guides
Build a Cold-Outreach Personalizer with Groq + Cloudflare Workers
Deploy a free-tier endpoint that reads a CSV of prospects, scrapes their LinkedIn or website via Playwright, and auto-generates personalized one-liners using Groq's LLM — all on the edge.
11 min read
Build Guides
Build a Daily Standup Bot: Collect Updates via DM, Summarize with Groq, Post to Slack
A hands-on guide to building a free-tier daily standup bot using n8n, Groq (Mixtral), and Slack. Collect async updates via DM, summarize them with an LLM, and post a coherent summary to your team channel every morning.
10 min read
Build Guides
Build a RAG Chatbot Over Your Own PDFs and Notes Using Qdrant Free Tier
Ship a local RAG pipeline that ingests your PDFs and markdown notes into Qdrant's free vector DB and answers questions with cited sources using Groq's blazing-fast Mixtral inference.
10 min read
Build Guides
Build a RAG Chatbot Over Your PDFs and Notes Using Supabase pgvector
Ship a local RAG chatbot that ingests PDFs and Markdown, stores embeddings in Supabase's free pgvector, and answers questions with Google Gemini—no paid tiers required.
7 min read
Build Guides
Build a Multi-Agent Research Assistant with Gemini Flash Free Tier
Build a planner-searcher-writer multi-agent system that decomposes questions, searches the web via SerpAPI, and synthesizes structured briefs using Gemini 1.5 Flash free tier and LangChain.
10 min read
Build Guides
Build a Viral Twitter/X Thread Generator from Rough Outlines with Groq
A hands-on guide to building a Streamlit web app that uses Groq's free Mixtral model to turn rough outlines into high-engagement Twitter threads with hooks, formatting, and CTAs.
12 min read
Build Guides
Build a Screenshot-to-Code Agent with Llama 3.2 Vision (Free Tier)
Turn UI mockups into production-ready HTML/Tailwind with a free CLI tool powered by OpenRouter's Llama 3.2 Vision. No API keys, no cost, just raw engineering.
9 min read
Build Guides
Build a Receipt-to-JSON Extractor with Google Gemini 1.5 Flash Free Tier
Build a zero-cost Python pipeline that watches a folder, OCRs receipts with Gemini 1.5 Flash, and outputs structured JSON with vendor, line items, and totals—no paid APIs required.
11 min read
Build Guides
Build a Codebase Q&A Tool with LlamaIndex & Supabase pgvector
Index your local Git repo into Supabase's free pgvector using LlamaIndex and query it with natural language. A hands-on CLI build guide with real code, architecture, and zero-cost LLMs.
9 min read
Build Guides
Build a Discord Community FAQ Bot with RAG on Qdrant Free Tier
Ship a Discord bot that understands your community's docs. We embed questions with Cloudflare Workers AI, retrieve context from Qdrant's free vector store, and answer with OpenRouter's free LLMs. Pure free-tier RAG.
11 min read
Build Guides
Build an AI Autofill Extension: Playwright + Gemini Reads Your Resume
Build a browser extension that uses Playwright and Google Gemini (free tier) to parse your resume and autofill any job application form. No manual typing, no fluff.
11 min read
Build Guides
Build a Lead-Enrichment Agent with Playwright and Gemini (Free Tier)
Scrape company websites and extract structured data using Playwright and Google Gemini's free tier. Build a Python agent that turns domain lists into enriched lead CSVs.
9 min read
Build Guides
Build a Local RAG Chatbot Over Your PDFs with Ollama, LlamaIndex, and Qdrant Free Tier
Build a fully local RAG pipeline that ingests your PDF library and answers questions using Ollama for private LLM inference and Qdrant's free cloud vector store. Complete engineering guide with code.
10 min read
Build Guides
Build a Smart Clipboard That Translates & Summarizes with Groq + Piper TTS
Build a free system tray app that watches your clipboard, summarizes or translates text using Groq's blazing-fast Llama inference, and reads it aloud with open-source Piper TTS. Full Python guide.
9 min read
Build Guides
Build a SQL Analyst Agent with Gemini and Postgres for Free
Build a natural-language SQL analyst that introspects your Postgres schema, generates queries via Google Gemini's free tier, and returns results. Step-by-step guide with code.
11 min read
Build Guides
Generate Anki Flashcards from Lecture Notes with Ollama & LangChain
Build a local, zero-cost Python tool that chunks Markdown lecture notes and uses a local LLM via Ollama to generate Anki-compatible Q&A flashcards. No API keys, no cloud costs.
11 min read
Build Guides
Build an On-Call Incident Summarizer with Cloudflare Workers AI
Build a free serverless function that accepts raw logs, uses Cloudflare Workers AI to summarize incidents, and drafts structured postmortems in Markdown. Copy-pasteable guide for engineers.
11 min read
Build Guides
Build a Discord FAQ Bot with n8n, Supabase pgvector, and Gemini
Ship a Discord community bot that answers questions from your docs using free-tier tools. Wire n8n webhooks to Supabase vector search and Google Gemini for RAG responses.
10 min read
Build Guides
Build a YouTube-to-Blog Repurposing Agent with Whisper, Groq, and Cloudflare Workers
Build a free, automated pipeline that downloads YouTube audio, transcribes it with Whisper, and generates SEO-friendly blog posts using Groq's LLM—all deployed on serverless Cloudflare Workers.
10 min read
105 articles and counting