d3b0

DeBugging Life in Real Time | Building Intelligent Systems that run Businesses | AI Engineer @CribblrAI Technologies Ltd.

[d3b0 @d3b0wale]

365DaysPushUp Challenge
DAY 182: 18,200 of 36,500

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365DaysPushUp Challenge
DAY 175: 17,500 of 36,500

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365DaysPushUp Challenge
DAY 175: 17,500 of 36,500

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365DaysPushUp Challenge
DAY 167: 16,700 of 36,500

[d3b0 @d3b0wale]

365DaysPushUp Challenge
DAY 167: 16,700 of 36,500

[d3b0 @d3b0wale]

365DaysPushUp Challenge
DAY 160: 16,000 of 36,500

[d3b0 @d3b0wale]

365DaysPushUp Challenge
DAY 160: 16,000 of 36,500

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365DaysPushUp Challenge
DAY 151: 15,100 of 36,500

Weekly Updates moving forward.

[Sam Altman @sama]

one of the quotes i find most inspiring on a hard day:

"Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might, for in the realm of the dead, where you are going, there is neither working nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom"

Ecclesiastes 9:10

[Y Combinator @ycombinator]

"You need to make yourself a big target for luck, and the way to do that is to be curious. Try lots of things, meet lots of people, read lots of books, ask lots of questions."

— Paul Graham, How to Do Great Work

https://t.co/AyIk5fnKZL

[d3b0 @d3b0wale]

Software is fundamentally about state transitions.

[d3b0 @d3b0wale]

Brute force is always an option. The question is always: can we do better, and how?

[Andrew Ng @AndrewYNg]

One of the new, buzzy jobs in Silicon Valley is the AI Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE), an engineer who is embedded within a client organization to help customize solutions, such as building and tuning agentic workflows that suit the client’s particular needs. I’ve heard from people who are wondering anew about the FDE career path since OpenAI and Anthropic started building new teams to place FDEs within client organizations.

The rise of FDEs for AI workloads is one way AI is creating new jobs (and why the jobpolcalypse narrative of upcoming job market collapse is false -- there will be many AI and non-AI jobs). However, I believe there will be far more AI Engineer jobs than FDEs, as I explain below.

The FDE role was pioneered about two decades ago by Palantir, which sent engineers to government locations to work on secure, air-gapped networks. In addition to having good technical skills, FDEs need communication skills and sometimes business skills. For example, they may need to speak with clients to understand their needs, formulate a strategy to prioritize projects, explain complex technology, and respectfully push back if a client asks for something unrealistic. They’re enjoying a resurgence because of the amount of work involved in taking an off-the-shelf LLM and building it into a custom agentic workflow that fits particular business needs.

However, I believe the number of AI Engineer jobs will be far larger. A company might accept a few FDEs to be embedded within its organization. But most companies will want far more of their own employees working on their projects. While my organizations do hire FDEs, we hire far more AI Engineers! Also, a common client concern is that it is hard to find vendor-neutral FDEs — they are, after all, there to deeply integrate a particular vendor’s product into a company. In this moment when it’s hard to predict which AI service will be the best one in a year’s time, optionality (the ability to pick whatever vendor turns out to fit best in the future) is very valuable. In contrast, letting FDEs tightly bind a company’s processes significantly reduces optionality.

Right now, I see surging demand for AI Engineers who can build software applications using AI software components (like LLM prompting, agentic frameworks, evals, etc.) and effectively use AI coding agents (like Claude Code, Codex, Antigravity CLI, and OpenCode). As the AI Engineer role matures, I expect it to fragment into more specialized roles, like the generic Software Engineer role from decades ago fragmented into frontend, backend, mobile, data engineering, devops, and so on.

What will be the future, specialized AI engineering roles? I don’t know. Perhaps there will be AI FDEs, LLMOps Engineers, Evals Engineers, AI Data Engineers, Harness Engineers, and other roles we don’t have names for yet. But for now, I see a lot of AI engineers who are generalists create a lot of value. Skilled AI Engineers are in very high demand! As our field continues to mature over the coming decade, I look forward to new specializations within AI Engineering that create even more job opportunities.

[Original text: The Batch newsletter]

[d3b0 @d3b0wale]

365DaysPushUp Challenge
DAY 151: 15,100 of 36,500

Weekly Updates moving forward.

[d3b0 @d3b0wale]

365DaysPushUp Challenge
DAY 148: 14,800 of 36,500

[d3b0 @d3b0wale]

365DaysPushUp Challenge
DAY 148: 14,800 of 36,500

[d3b0 @d3b0wale]

365DaysPushUp Challenge
DAY 147: 14,700 of 36,500

[d3b0 @d3b0wale]

365DaysPushUp Challenge
DAY 147: 14,700 of 36,500

[d3b0 @d3b0wale]

365DaysPushUp Challenge
DAY 146: 14,600 of 36,500

[d3b0 @d3b0wale]

Brute force is always an option. The question is always: can we do better, and how?

[d3b0 @d3b0wale]

Absolutely!

Correctness and efficiency are separate concerns. Never confuse "it works" with "it's good enough."

[Glory Praise Emmanuel @emmaglorypraise]

Caching is often introduced as a straightforward way to improve performance.

And it does.

However, it also introduces a different class of problems:

- stale data
- cache invalidation challenges
- consistency issues

In many cases, caching does not reduce complexity, it shifts it.

Understanding when and how to use caching effectively is important for building reliable systems, not just fast ones.

[d3b0 @d3b0wale]

365DaysPushUp Challenge
DAY 146: 14,600 of 36,500

[d3b0 @d3b0wale]

365DaysPushUp Challenge
DAY 145: 14,500 of 36,500

[d3b0 @d3b0wale]

365DaysPushUp Challenge
DAY 145: 14,500 of 36,500

[d3b0 @d3b0wale]

365DaysPushUp Challenge
DAY 144: 14,400 of 36,500

[d3b0 @d3b0wale]

If you sit down to code and you're still making fundamental architectural decisions, you started too early.

[d3b0 @d3b0wale]

365DaysPushUp Challenge
DAY 144: 14,400 of 36,500

[d3b0 @d3b0wale]

365DaysPushUp Challenge
DAY 143: 14,300 of 36,500

[d3b0 @d3b0wale]

365DaysPushUp Challenge
DAY 143: 14,300 of 36,500

[d3b0 @d3b0wale]

365DaysPushUp Challenge
DAY 142: 14,200 of 36,500

[d3b0 @d3b0wale]

A fundamental principle in AI systems engineering: Use AI where you need intelligence. Use deterministic systems where you need reliability.