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
How to Start an AI Engineer Career: A Practical Roadmap for 2025
A no-fluff, engineer-to-engineer roadmap to becoming an AI Engineer in 2025. Learn the exact skills, projects, and job strategies to break in.
10 min read
Guides
Forward Deployed Engineer UK Salary: 2025 Compensation Guide
Comprehensive 2025 salary data for Forward Deployed Engineers in the UK. Breakdowns by seniority, location, company type, and equity. Learn what top FDEs earn.
12 min read
Guides
Palantir FDE Interview Loop: The Brutal Process & How to Prep
A high-signal breakdown of the Palantir Forward Deployed Engineer interview loop. Covers the decomposition, learning, and hiring manager rounds based on insider Blind data.
11 min read
Guides
AI Engineer Job Interview Questions: Technical & Behavioral Prep Guide
Master AI engineer job interview questions with this technical and behavioral guide. Covers ML coding, system design, LLM deployment, and culture-fit prep for 2026.
10 min read
Guides
Is AI Engineer a Good Career in 2025? Satisfaction, Growth & Stability Data
Hard data on AI engineer job satisfaction, salary growth, and career stability. Is AI engineering just hype or a durable career? We break down the numbers.
8 min read
Guides
Forward Deployed Engineer Pros and Cons: Is This Role Right for You?
Unpack the high-stakes reality of the Forward Deployed Engineer role. We break down the salary, travel demands, technical depth, and exit opportunities to help you decide if FDE is your career accelerator or a burnout trap.
10 min read
Guides
Forward Deployed Engineer vs Product Manager: Role Comparison & Fit
Forward Deployed Engineer vs Product Manager: a deep comparison of responsibilities, skills, salaries, and career trajectories. Find your best fit in technical customer-facing roles.
11 min read
Guides
AI Engineer Job Duties: A Day-to-Day Breakdown of Responsibilities
Cut through the hype. This is a sharp, engineer-to-engineer breakdown of what an AI engineer actually does daily: building pipelines, taming hallucinations, and deploying models.
8 min read
Guides
AI Engineer vs ML Engineer: Career Paths, Skills & Key Differences
AI Engineer vs ML Engineer: Compare roles, required skills, salaries, and career paths. Learn which engineering track fits your goals and how to bridge the gap.
9 min read
Forward Deployed
The FDE Portfolio in 2025: Projects That Prove You Can Ship in Chaos
Forget toy apps. A Forward Deployed Engineer portfolio must demonstrate speed, ambiguity absorption, and customer-facing delivery. Here's how to build one that gets you hired.
10 min read
Forward Deployed
A Forward Deployed Engineer's Week: Real Workflows, Not Hype
A concrete breakdown of a Forward Deployed Engineer's week: solving real customer problems, shipping fast prototypes, and bridging the gap between sales and engineering. No buzzwords, just the gritty reality.
9 min read
Forward Deployed
Writing Customer-Facing Technical Docs That Actually Get Read: An FDE's Guide
Stop writing documentation that collects digital dust. Learn the FDE playbook for creating customer-facing technical docs that users read, understand, and act on—driving adoption and reducing support load.
8 min read
Forward Deployed
How FDEs Work with Product and Engineering After the Sale: A Collaboration Model
A concrete model for how Forward Deployed Engineers partner with Product and core Engineering post-sale—from triaging escalations to shaping the roadmap with customer telemetry. No theory, just the workflows, artifacts, and comp context.
9 min read
Forward Deployed
The Tools an FDE Ships With: Data, Integrations, and Demos That Close Deals
A Forward Deployed Engineer's actual toolkit: the data integration platforms, API glue, and demo environments that turn messy enterprise problems into closed revenue in a single week.
10 min read
Forward Deployed
Scaling Yourself: The Art of an FDE Handoff to Core Engineering
A concrete playbook for Forward Deployed Engineers on executing a clean handoff. Learn when to hand off, how to structure artifacts, and how to avoid the dreaded "re-write".
7 min read
Forward Deployed
On-Site vs Remote FDE: Travel Realities, Burnout, and Setting Boundaries
Forward deployed engineer travel isn't glamorous—it's a logistics puzzle with high burnout risk. This guide breaks down on-site vs remote realities, comp structures, and boundary-setting tactics that keep you effective without breaking you.
10 min read
Forward Deployed
How FDEs Turn a Messy Customer Problem into a Shipped Prototype in a Week
A concrete playbook for Forward Deployed Engineers: compress discovery, scope ruthlessly, pick boring infra, and ship a working prototype in 5 days without burning yourself out.
9 min read
Forward Deployed
Deploying an LLM Feature at an Enterprise Customer: A Week-by-Week Case Study
A concrete case study of deploying an LLM feature inside a regulated enterprise. Week-by-week breakdown of on-site discovery, air-gapped architecture, prompt engineering, and the FDE comp tied to shipping high-stakes integrations.
9 min read
AI News
Ghost Font: How a Typeface Evades AI OCR While Staying Human-Readable
Ghost Font exploits the gap between human visual perception and machine vision to render text invisible to OCR. We break down the technique, why it matters for engineers building RAG pipelines and document extractors, and how to test it today.
10 min read
AI News
GPT-5.6 Agent Migration: 2.2x Speedup & 27% Cost Cut Benchmarks
Ploy's production agent migration to GPT-5.6 delivered 2.2x faster inference and 27% lower cost. We break down the benchmarks, architecture, and how engineers can replicate these gains today.
9 min read
AI News
Grok CLI Wire Forensics: What `grok build` Actually Sends to xAI
A packet-level analysis of the `grok build` CLI reveals it transmits a full project tree, system prompts, and binary blobs. Here's what engineers need to know about the API contract, security implications, and how to inspect it yourself.
9 min read
AI News
Mesh LLM: Peer-to-Peer Distributed Inference for Local-First AI Clusters
Mesh LLM over iroh splits LLM inference across peer devices without a central server. Explore the protocol, run it locally, and understand why this matters for edge AI.
11 min read
AI News
Claude Code Burns 33k Tokens Before Your Prompt: A Token Overhead Deep-Dive
A technical deep-dive into why Claude Code consumes 33k tokens of overhead before reading your prompt, how OpenCode slashes that to 7k, and what this means for your workflow, costs, and agent architecture.
10 min read
Build Guides
Build a PR Review Bot That Comments on GitHub PRs with a Free LLM
Ship an automated code reviewer that spots bugs, security flaws, and style issues on every pull request. Uses GitHub Actions, Cloudflare Workers AI free tier, and Octokit—zero cost, full control.
11 min read
1,162 articles and counting