What Is A Forward Deployed Engineer?

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 08:00:00 -0400

Matt and Robert unpack the Forward Deployed Engineer: a Palantir-coined, customer-facing role that parks an engineer at a customer site for a set stretch of time. They trace the name to military “forward basing,” ask whether an FDE is just a consultant with better branding (or a one-person Pivotal-style embed), and look at why vendors bake these unicorns into the price of the software — so the product actually gets used instead of sitting on the shelf until next year’s renewal.

Links & mentions

FDE on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward_deployed_engineer
A Day in the Life of a Palantir Forward Deployed Software Engineer: https://blog.palantir.com/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-palantir-forward-deployed-software-engineer-45ef2de257b1

Watch this episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxIBrEyJO-k

Welcome to the Madhouse

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 08:00:00 -0400

Matt and Robert launch Software Madhouse with the AI open-source firehose: drive-by slop PRs flooding projects like Helm, extra maintainer load, and how communities are fighting back with policies, GitHub caps, kernel Assisted-by: trailers, and tools like Vouch and Good Egg.

Links & mentions

Kubernetes: Open source maintainership in the age of AI — https://www.kubernetes.dev/blog/2026/06/26/open-source-maintainership-in-the-age-of-ai/
GitHub: Limit open PRs for users without write access — https://github.blog/changelog/2026-06-17-limit-open-pull-requests-for-users-without-write-access/
Linux kernel coding assistants — https://docs.kernel.org/process/coding-assistants.html
Vouch (Mitchell Hashimoto / Ghostty) — https://github.com/mitchellh/vouch
Good Egg — https://github.com/2ndSetAI/good-egg

Watch this episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRGkEQvsIGo