John Engates

--Dangerously-skipping-permissions

[John Engates @jengates]

@bryanrbeal Agree. Three perfect cars.

[John Engates @jengates]

Why does the Forward Deployed Engineer look exactly like me?

[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]

[John Engates @jengates]

San Antonio!!!

[John Engates @jengates]

The spurs are so far ahead, they’re putting in the nuns.

[John Engates @jengates]

@bryanrbeal I still have this poster rolled up in the closet somewhere of a lamborghini countach from the 80s. And you're absolutely right about that dumb looking ferrari.

[John Engates @jengates]

@sweetlew must be china?

[John Engates @jengates]

@bryanrbeal my off-the-cuff theory. all the pros are off. all the homeowners that would actually do projects are all getting too old to do their own work. none of the young folks own homes or don't do any home improvement or gardening.

or maybe they're just all at Lowe's? 🤷‍♂️

[John Engates @jengates]

did he just forget he had legs?

[Right Angle News Network @Rightanglenews]

U.S. Forest Service law enforcement is now asking for the public’s help identifying a group of Indian nationals seen defacing Cathedral Rock in Sedona, Arizona, a sacred Native American site, with furious Americans demanding their immediate deportation.

[Michael Dell 🇺🇸 @MichaelDell]

Wemby from half court at the buzzer!

[John Engates @jengates]

@NigelBest5 I’m so sorry.

[Bojan Tunguz @tunguz]

If you are normie with a desk job, immediately go and replace your computer with a Mac and install Codex.

You will be way ahead of all of your peers.

Go into debt if you have to.

[John Engates @jengates]

@Scobleizer Basically Angelina Jolie

[John Engates @jengates]

@FactsAboutTexas I'm so sorry to see this.

[John Engates @jengates]

@jhong I remember

[John Engates @jengates]

A starlink is now $199. Everyone should probably have one

https://t.co/exHR9BFTkL

[Starlink @Starlink]

Starlink Mini offers fast, reliable internet on the go—great for traveling, camping, exploring, boating, RVing, and more.

Order online in under 2 minutes.

[Robert Scoble @Scobleizer]

This is one you should watch on a big TV.

One of the most incredible corporate videos I ever have seen and I was with the GoPro video team the night it released its Hero 2 video that brought that company to an IPO.

[John Engates @jengates]

Congratulations to Sebastian Sawe! Amazing.

[Marcus Milione @MarcusMilione]

The sub 2 hour marathon barrier has been broken in London

Sabastian Sawe: 1:59:30
Yomif Kejelcha: 1:59:41

4:34/mile for 26.2 miles... insane

[John Engates @jengates]

@realDaveFeldman Congrats @realDaveFeldman !!!