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.
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Guides
Forward Deployed Engineer AI: Merging Deployment Expertise with Intelligence
Learn how the Forward Deployed Engineer AI role blends on-site deployment, rapid prototyping, and LLM orchestration to solve mission-critical enterprise problems.
10 min read
Guides
How to Prepare for an FDE Interview: A Builder's Preparation Strategy
Master how to prepare for an FDE interview with a builder's mindset. Learn the 4-round loop, technical deep-dive, and deployment scenario tactics to ship wins.
9 min read
Guides
Forward Deployed Engineer AI: Merging Deployment with Intelligence
Forward Deployed Engineer AI roles blend on-site engineering with rapid AI prototyping. Learn the skills, salary, roadmap, and how to break into this high-impact field.
10 min read
Guides
AI Engineer Career Path After 10th Grade: Subjects, Roadmap & Salary
Complete AI engineer career path after 10th: stream selection, diploma vs. degree, essential subjects, 7-year roadmap, salary benchmarks, and how to start building real projects today.
12 min read
Guides
FDE Engineer Interview: Prepare as a Builder, Not a Talker | 2025 Guide
Ace the FDE engineer interview by shifting from theoretical answers to builder-mode execution. Master the technical deep-dive, customer scenario, and 'build-in-the-room' challenges that define top-tier Forward Deployed Engineer loops.
12 min read
Forward Deployed
From Customer Handoff to Working Prototype: The FDE's First Week Sprint
A concrete engineer-to-engineer playbook for the first 5 days of a Forward Deployed Engineer engagement. From scoping the handshake to shipping a working prototype, learn the tactical workflow, decision points, and tools that separate high-signal FDEs from the noise.
9 min read
Forward Deployed
A Week in the Life of a Forward Deployed Engineer: The Shipping Cadence
What does a forward deployed engineer do weekly? A concrete walkthrough of the Monday-to-Friday sprint: customer standups, rapid prototyping, on-site debugging, and shipping code that closes deals.
8 min read
Forward Deployed
Case Study: Deploying an LLM Feature at a Regulated Enterprise Customer
A step-by-step FDE playbook for shipping a private LLM summarization feature inside a bank. Covers air-gapped deployment, policy-as-code guardrails, and the messy reality of enterprise compliance.
6 min read
Forward Deployed
The FDE Portfolio: 5 Projects That Get You Hired, Not Just Side Projects
Stop building toy apps. Forward deployed engineer portfolio projects must prove you can ship in messy enterprise environments. Here are 5 concrete builds that signal FDE readiness.
10 min read
Forward Deployed
The FDE Interview Loop: How to Prepare as a Builder, Not a Talker
FDE interviews test shipping, not storytelling. Learn the 5-stage loop, technical demo expectations, and the 30-60-90 rule to prove you can deploy under customer constraints.
12 min read
Forward Deployed
The Highest-Leverage FDE Skills in the AI Era: Prompting, Data Prep, and Rapid Modeling
Stop memorizing architectures. The highest-leverage FDE skills in the AI era are ruthless data preparation, adversarial prompting, and shipping a working model before the meeting ends.
9 min read
Forward Deployed
What a Forward Deployed Engineer Actually Does in a Week: The Customer Shipping Cadence
A concrete breakdown of the FDE weekly rhythm: from Monday customer standups and midweek prototype builds to Friday production deploys. Real workflows, tooling, and comp context.
8 min read
AI News
AI Psychosis: When LLM Hallucinations Become a Leadership and Product Risk
LLM hallucinations aren't just funny errors—they're a systemic product risk. Learn why engineers call it 'AI psychosis,' how it threatens user trust, and practical mitigation patterns.
8 min read
AI News
LLMs Can't Jump: The Spatial Reasoning Ceiling for Vision Models
Vision-language models ace object detection but fail hard on spatial reasoning. We break down the 'Can't Jump' paper, why your RAG or robotics pipeline breaks, and how to engineer around it.
9 min read
AI News
Kitesurf: Running Agent-First Browsers Inside V8 Isolates for Secure Automation
Cloudflare's Kitesurf runs headless browsers inside V8 isolates, not containers. Here's the engineering breakdown, why it matters for secure automation, and how to try it.
9 min read
AI News
Oracle Bans AI Code in OpenJDK: The Legal and Quality Calculus for Engineers
Oracle bans AI-generated code from OpenJDK, prioritizing legal integrity and deterministic quality over LLM speed. Here's the technical breakdown of why the calculus matters for forward-deployed engineers.
7 min read
AI News
Databricks Cut AI Coding Costs 70%: The Engineer's Playbook for Cheaper LLMs
Databricks slashed AI coding costs by 70% without losing quality. Here is the technical breakdown of routing, caching, and small fine-tuned models that working engineers can apply today.
9 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
Guides
Palantir Forward Deployed Engineer Salary UK: Pay Ranges & Career Levels
Real UK pay data for Palantir Forward Deployed Engineers: base salary, TC, equity, and signing bonuses by level. See how FDSE comp stacks up in London and beyond.
8 min read
Guides
Forward Deployed Engineer Databricks Salary: Pay Bands & Role Breakdown
Databricks FDE compensation ranges from $170K to $400K+. We break down base salary, equity, and bonus for L4 to L6 Forward Deployed Engineers, including the new AI Engineer track.
9 min read
Guides
Forward Deployed Engineer Salary New York: 2025 Compensation Benchmarks
Unpack the 2025 Forward Deployed Engineer salary in New York. From base pay to equity, see how top-tier FDEs push past $400K total comp in NYC's hyper-competitive market.
8 min read
1,162 articles and counting