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.
Page 4 of 5
Build Guides
Build a Competitor Monitoring Agent That Alerts on Site Changes Using Playwright
Scrape competitor sites, diff content against a baseline, and get Slack alerts with human-readable summaries—all using Playwright, Groq, and free-tier tools.
10 min read
Build Guides
Build a YouTube-to-Blog Repurposing Agent Using Whisper and a Free LLM
Pipeline to download audio with yt-dlp, transcribe locally with Whisper, and structure a polished blog post via Groq's free LLM tier. Zero-cost content repurposing in ~100 lines.
9 min read
Build Guides
Turn UI Screenshots Into Production Code With a Free Vision LLM
Build a Python pipeline that captures UI screenshots with Playwright and converts them into clean HTML/CSS or React code using a free Hugging Face vision model. Zero-cost, production-ready starting point.
11 min read
Build Guides
Build a GitHub Issue Triager That Auto-Labels and Routes to the Right Owner
Build a zero-cost GitHub Actions bot that uses Groq's fast Llama 3 inference to auto-label, prioritize, and assign new issues. Complete implementation guide with code.
11 min read
Build Guides
Build a Discord FAQ Bot with Supabase pgvector + Cloudflare Workers AI
Deploy a free, serverless Discord bot that answers community questions using RAG over your docs. Uses Discord.js, Supabase pgvector, and Cloudflare Workers AI.
10 min read
Build Guides
Build a Lead-Enrichment Agent That Researches Companies Using Serper and Gemini
Build a zero-cost lead-enrichment pipeline that takes a CSV of domains, scrapes live company data, and uses Gemini to generate detailed prospect profiles. Free-tier tools only.
9 min read
Build Guides
Build a Free AI Newsletter Agent with Groq, Supabase & GitHub Actions
Engineer a personalized newsletter agent that curates RSS feeds using Groq's Llama 3.3 and Supabase. A copy-pasteable guide to ranking articles and sending digests on free-tier tools.
10 min read
Build Guides
Build a Multi-Agent Research Assistant with Groq, Serper, and Llama 3.3
Build a multi-agent research system that plans queries, scrapes the web via Serper's free tier, and synthesizes cited briefs using Llama 3.3 on Groq. Pure free-tier stack.
10 min read
Build Guides
Build a Smart Clipboard That Summarizes and Translates Anything You Copy with Gemini
Build a Python system-tray app that auto-summarizes and translates any text you copy using Google Gemini's free API tier. Full code, zero-cost architecture, and engineer-to-engineer walkthrough included.
10 min read
Build Guides
Build a Daily Standup Bot with Slack, Supabase & Groq (Free Tier)
Engineer a zero-cost daily standup bot that DMs your team for updates, persists them in Supabase, and uses Groq's LLM to post a synthesized summary to Slack every morning.
11 min read
Build Guides
Build a Personal Finance Categorizer from Bank CSVs Using OpenRouter Free Models
Turn raw bank CSV exports into a categorized spending dashboard with free LLMs. This guide uses OpenRouter free models, Pandas, and Streamlit to build a privacy-first finance categorizer.
10 min read
Build Guides
Build a WhatsApp Customer-Support Agent Backed by Your Docs Using Free AI
Deploy a production-grade WhatsApp bot that answers questions from your docs. Uses Cloudflare Workers AI, Pinecone free tier, and TypeScript—all free to run.
10 min read
Build Guides
Build a Resume Tailoring Agent That Rewrites Your CV for a Specific Job Description Using Gemini
Build a Python agent that ingests your base resume and a job description, then uses Gemini's free tier to rewrite bullet points and output an ATS-optimized LaTeX PDF—all for free.
10 min read
Build Guides
Deploy a RAG Chatbot Over Your PDFs and Notes with Qdrant Free Tier & Groq
Build a local-first RAG chatbot that answers questions from PDFs and markdown notes with source citations using Groq, Qdrant free tier, LlamaIndex, and Streamlit.
9 min read
Build Guides
Build a Screenshot-to-Code Agent Using LLaVA via Ollama and Open-Source Tools
Turn UI screenshots into live HTML/CSS with a local pipeline. Use LLaVA via Ollama for vision-to-code generation and Playwright for instant previews, all running free on your machine.
9 min read
Build Guides
Build a Calendar-Scheduling Agent That Negotiates Over Email with Gemini Free Tier
Engineer an AI bot that parses meeting requests, checks Google Calendar, and auto-negotiates times via Gmail using Gemini free tier, n8n, and GCP free credits.
10 min read
Build Guides
Build a Study Flashcard Generator That Turns Lecture Notes into Anki Decks with Groq's Free LLM
Script a free Python tool that chunks lecture PDFs or Markdown notes and uses Groq's free Llama-3.1-70B to generate high-signal question-answer pairs in Anki CSV format, ready for import.
11 min read
Build Guides
Build a Multi-Agent Research Assistant with Gemini Flash Free Tier
Build a planner-searcher-writer agent system using Google Gemini Flash's free tier. Decompose topics, fetch live web results via SerpAPI, and synthesize structured briefs with Python and LangChain.
11 min read
Build Guides
Build a PDF Invoice Extractor That Outputs Structured JSON with Gemini Flash Free Tier
Build a Python pipeline that ingests messy PDF invoices and receipts, extracts text with PyPDF2, and structures it into clean JSON using Google Gemini Flash's free tier. No paid APIs required.
12 min read
Build Guides
Build a SQL Analyst Agent with LlamaIndex and Groq’s Free Tier
Ship a text-to-SQL agent that translates plain English into Postgres queries using LlamaIndex and Groq's free Llama 3 70B. Step-by-step code, zero-cost infra, and production tips.
9 min read
Build Guides
Build a Voice Assistant for Your Terminal with Local Whisper, Ollama, and Piper TTS
Wire up a fully local, zero-cost voice assistant in your terminal. We'll chain Whisper STT, Ollama (Llama 3), and Piper TTS with Python to build a talking CLI.
11 min read
Build Guides
Build a Cold Email Personalizer with Groq's Free LLM and Python
Build a script that reads a prospect CSV, scrapes their LinkedIn or website with Firecrawl's free tier, and generates hyper-personalized cold email opening lines using Groq's free Llama 3 70B API.
11 min read
Build Guides
Build a Personal Finance Categorizer from Bank CSVs Using a Free Local LLM
Stop manually tagging transactions. Use Ollama, Python, and a local LLM to auto-categorize bank CSVs. A free, private, step-by-step engineering guide with real code.
10 min read
Build Guides
Build a WhatsApp Customer Support Agent Backed by Your Docs with n8n and Qdrant
Wire up a free AI agent that answers WhatsApp support queries using your own documentation. We use n8n for automation, Qdrant for vector search, and Groq's fast Llama inference—all on free tiers.
11 min read
105 articles and counting