The most interesting AI story in software right now might not be code generation. It might be the org chart. That’s what I see behind the renewed attention around the Forward Deployed Engineer. The role itself isn’t new. But seeing it move closer to the center of the AI conversation feels significant. OpenAI launching a Deployment Company built around embedding FDEs inside organizations is one example. To me, the signal is bigger than the title. For years, one of the biggest constraints in software was simply producing enough of it. More roadmap usually meant more engineers, more teams, more specialization, and eventually, more coordination between all of them. AI changes that equation. If engineers can build, test, and iterate much faster, you’d think complexity would shrink. It doesn’t. It moves somewhere else. It moves into understanding the problem, making the right tradeoffs, integrating with real systems, and making sure what gets built actually works in the business. That’s why the FDE model catches my attention. It brings technical ownership much closer to the actual problem, and it challenges the idea that engineering capacity should be measured by headcount or by how much software you can produce. A smaller team isn’t automatically better. But a senior team with context, autonomy, good judgment, and fewer handoffs can become remarkably capable when each person has more leverage. Sometimes I wonder how much of today’s technology organization exists because software used to be much harder and slower to produce. More people meant more capacity. Specialization was necessary. Coordination was the price we paid for scale. I’m not convinced those assumptions survive unchanged when engineers suddenly have a lot more leverage. To me, that’s the interesting part of the FDE conversation. It’s not really about a new role. It’s about what happens to the rest of the organization when the old bottleneck starts to move.
Really like this framing. AI may make software faster to produce, but it does not remove complexity. It moves it closer to context, judgment, integration, and ownership. That’s what makes the FDE conversation so interesting.
A really insightful read, Nicolas Sansot. Always fascinating to see how AI is shaping the workforce, and bringing forward challenges that were unheard of in the past.
Fewer handoffs, smaller teams, more context.
This caught my eye; "A smaller team isn’t automatically better. But a senior team with context, autonomy, good judgment, and fewer handoffs can become remarkably capable when each person has more leverage. Sometimes I wonder how much of today’s technology organization exists because software used to be much harder and slower to produce." That seems remarkably insightful. There is leverage today that didn't exist 10 years ago, much less 6 months ago.