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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Build Guides
Build a Lead-Enrichment Agent That Scrapes Domains with Playwright & Gemini
Build a Python agent that scrapes company websites with Playwright and uses Google Gemini's free tier to auto-generate structured lead profiles from a list of domains.
8 min read
Guides
Palantir FDE Ontology: A Technical Deep Dive for Forward Deployed Engineers
A technical deep dive into Palantir's Ontology—the semantic backbone of Foundry. Learn how Forward Deployed Engineers map real-world entities to digital twins, build operational pipelines, and bridge the gap between raw data and decision-making apps.
9 min read
Guides
FDE Interview LeetCode Prep: Coding Round Strategy & Common Patterns
Master the FDE coding interview with a LeetCode strategy tailored for Forward Deployed Engineers. Learn top patterns, debugging under pressure, and the 'practicality layer' that standard SWE prep misses.
10 min read
Guides
Palantir FDE Explained: Role, Strategy, and Real Customer Impact
A technical deep-dive into the Palantir Forward Deployed Engineer role: how FDEs embed with customers, write production code in chaos, and bridge product gaps to drive enterprise outcomes.
9 min read
Guides
AI Engineer Job Scope: Core Responsibilities & Daily Work in 2025
A concrete breakdown of the AI engineer job scope—from prompt engineering and RAG pipelines to fine-tuning and MLOps. See salary data, daily workflows, and required skills.
9 min read
Guides
AI Engineer Career Path: Specializing on the Azure Ecosystem in 2025
Master the Azure AI engineer career path: from core certifications and salary data to real-world architecture patterns. A zero-fluff technical guide for engineers.
9 min read
Guides
Palantir FDE vs FDSE: Role Differences, Salary, and Career Paths
Palantir FDE vs FDSE: a no-fluff breakdown of Forward Deployed Engineer and Forward Deployed Software Engineer roles, daily work, salary bands, career ladders, and which path fits you.
8 min read
Guides
How to Land an AI Engineer Job at Entry Level: Skills, Strategy & Salary
A practical, no-fluff guide to landing an entry-level AI engineer job. Covers the exact skills, project portfolio strategy, and how to break in with no experience, plus salary data.
7 min read
Guides
Palantir FDE Intern Interview: Recruiting Process & How to Prepare
Breakdown of the Palantir Forward Deployed Engineer intern loop: resume screen, recruiter call, decomp, learning, and hiring manager interviews. Prep strategy and real expectations.
11 min read
Guides
How to Switch to an AI Engineer Career: A Practical Guide for Experienced Devs
A no-fluff guide for senior developers transitioning to an AI engineering role. Learn the required skill stack shift, practical project roadmaps, and salary negotiations.
9 min read
Guides
Palantir FDE Commercial vs Government: Deployment Differences and Skills Needed
A technical breakdown of Palantir Forward Deployed Engineer roles in commercial vs government sectors. Compare deployment constraints, tech stacks, and the exact skills you need to get hired.
10 min read
Forward Deployed
How FDEs Work with Product and Engineering After the Sale Closes
A concrete playbook for FDEs navigating the post-sale reality: bridging product gaps, managing technical debt, and engineering solutions that turn a signed contract into a live, happy customer. Includes real workflows and compensation context for the forward deployed engineer ramp salary curve.
8 min read
Forward Deployed
FDE Compensation Bands and How to Negotiate Your Offer in 2026
Concrete Palantir FDE comp bands for 2026 (base, RSUs, signing) across levels, the $500K engineer breakdown, and a tactical negotiation playbook for forward deployed offers.
9 min read
Forward Deployed
Forward Deployed Engineer vs AI Engineer: Distinct Roles and Overlap
A concrete breakdown of Forward Deployed Engineer vs AI Engineer roles: real workflows, tools, compensation bands, and the critical overlap where product meets production. No hype, just engineering.
8 min read
Forward Deployed
What a Forward Deployed Engineer Actually Does in a Week: A Concrete Workflow
A real-play look at the FDE week: from on-site triage and debugging customer infra to shipping a prototype by Friday. Includes comp data, tool stacks, and tactical workflows.
10 min read
Forward Deployed
Case Study: Deploying an LLM Feature at a Regulated Enterprise Customer
A concrete engineering walkthrough of deploying an LLM-driven summarization feature inside a FISMA-regulated agency. Covers air-gapped fine-tuning, RAG with PII isolation, and the FDE comp trajectory.
6 min read
AI News
OpenAI Restores 5-Hour Codex Limits: Engineering Workflow Impact
OpenAI restored 5-hour Codex limits for ChatGPT Plus. We break down the quota mechanics, what it means for daily coding workflows, and how Forward Deployed Engineers can integrate this into a high-signal development loop without hitting the wall.
9 min read
AI News
OCR It: Build a Document-to-LLM Pipeline When Copy-Paste Is Blocked
Stuck behind a locked PDF or unscrapable document? Learn how to build a local OCR-to-LLM pipeline that extracts text from screenshots, bypassing UI copy-blockers for your RAG and agent workflows.
7 min read
AI News
Why VMs Won't Contain Cyber-Capable AI: A Technical Breakdown
Virtual machines aren't the sandbox you think they are. We break down why modern AI agents escape VM containment through side-channels, hardware passthrough, and prompt engineering—and what engineers should build instead.
10 min read
AI News
Qwen3.8-Flash-Next: Under-the-Hood Upgrades for Agentic Workflows
Alibaba's Qwen3.8-Flash-Next isn't a bigger model—it's a surgical upgrade for tool-calling, structured output, and multi-turn stability. Here's what changed and why it matters for agentic pipelines.
11 min read
AI News
GLM-5.3-Flash: What Its Price-Performance Curve Means for API Budgets
GLM-5.3-Flash disrupts the cost-quality curve. We break down the benchmarks, decode the pricing, and show engineers how to swap it into production pipelines without rewriting the architecture.
8 min read
Build Guides
Build a Multi-Agent Research Assistant with OpenRouter and Playwright
Build a free-tier multi-agent research assistant that plans queries, searches the web, scrapes results, and writes structured briefs using OpenRouter, Playwright, and Python.
10 min read
Build Guides
Build a GitHub Issue Triager Using Groq and Cloudflare Workers
Deploy a serverless GitHub App that auto-labels and routes new issues. Uses Llama 3 on Groq free tier and Cloudflare Workers to comment with triage summaries.
11 min read
Build Guides
Build a Discord FAQ Bot with Pinecone Free Tier & Gemini
Build a Discord bot that ingests your docs into Pinecone’s free vector DB and answers questions with sourced replies using Google Gemini’s free API. Full Python code, step-by-step.
11 min read
1,162 articles and counting