The whole road
Forward Deployed Engineer
Ship AI into someone else's messy systems.
5 stages, free, drawn before you pay anything, because you never pay anything.
The road, drawn end to end
1Ground truth
What an FDE actually does all day, from people doing it.stage 1 of 5
What an FDE actually does all day, from people doing it.stage 1 of 5
2The pipeline that survives
Ship a retrieval pipeline that holds up against bad data.stage 2 of 5
Ship a retrieval pipeline that holds up against bad data.stage 2 of 5
3Agents in anger
Give the pipeline hands, then watch what it breaks.stage 3 of 5
Give the pipeline hands, then watch what it breaks.stage 3 of 5
4Someone else’s systems
Deploy into a codebase you did not write and cannot rewrite.stage 4 of 5
Deploy into a codebase you did not write and cannot rewrite.stage 4 of 5
5Prove it
A portfolio piece that reads as evidence, not homework.stage 5 of 5
A portfolio piece that reads as evidence, not homework.stage 5 of 5
playbooks 4
reviews 12
- Chroma, a vector store you can start with in one line
- Braintrust, evals and observability in one product
- LlamaIndex, the shortest path from a client's documents to a query engine
- Helicone, observability you can add by changing a URL
- OpenRouter, one endpoint in front of hundreds of models
- pgvector, vector search inside the database you already run
- Promptfoo, the eval harness you can put in CI on day one
- Langfuse, traces you can keep inside the client's network
- Claude Agent SDK, the agent harness without writing the loop
- LiteLLM, one API shape in front of a hundred models
- LangGraph, state machines for agents that run longer than a request
- Ragas, RAG metrics that start fast and need calibrating
career bridge 7
kits 4
news 12
- MCP goes stateless, and starts a twelve-month clock
- The EU AI Act's enforcement machinery switches on this Sundaycore
- Indian AI hiring rose 16 percent while IT hiring fellcore
- Claude Sonnet 5 lands, with an introductory price that expires
- A simple RAG baseline matched the complicated pipelines
- Hype check: does 95 percent of enterprise AI really fail?
- Forward deployed engineer is now a title people hire for by name
- Prompt injection beat web agents in most attempts
- Hype check: is AI already destroying entry-level jobs?core
- IndiaAI Mission backs 20 homegrown models and subsidised computecore
- The scoreboard may be crediting the model for the harness's work
- Two remote code execution flaws in a major agent framework
newsletter 1
The free, honest AI school. No card, no phone number.