alt Hacker NewsWell for full disclosure, I lead a team of forward deployed engineers at a database company. The role typically means that our engineers are embedded within the customer for extended period of times, and they work on basically devops, software engineering + some more traditional solution architecting, which is basically what the article describes.
They use LLMs in similar ways that regular engineers use. This is an engineering role, not a product / project management role. I don’t think this role is anything super special that will be revolutionized in any different way than that other engineering roles are affected.
In the end their value add is that they’re both embedded within the customer’s and our company, they’re our eyes and ears within the customer. Their purpose is not to make sales demos, their purpose is to make our software actually work properly for the customer’s needs.
OK, we both have the same understanding.
I'm saying giving an FDE the ability to significantly modify code for customer needs using a powerful frontier model will make their job more about customer discovery and strategy than about engineering, a big shift of ratio of where they spend their time. It will make the feedback loops tighter, let them experiment faster.