Forward Deployed Engineering Track Debuts At AI Engineer World’s Fair

we have been scaling without slop by working with aligned domain experts to add coverage

with both oai and ant launching multi-billion dollar services arms, it’s clear that FDE is one of the most in demand disciplines on earth, but I have never done the job

it’s been an absolute pleasure working with Basil on our first ever AI FDE miniconference!

see at https://ai.engineer/wf next week

The roster: - Pauline Brunet - VP of FDE, @cursor_ai - @LeoMehr - Director of FDE, @tryramp - @EnoReyes - CTO, @FactoryAI - Jia Wu - FDE Team Lead, @cognition - @natalie_meurer - Head of Agent Eng, @SierraPlatform - @sunnyrekhi - FDE CTO, @DecagonAI - @VinooGanesh - CEO, @kepler_ai_hq - @vasuman - CEO, @varickagents

Thanks to @swyx and the team at @aiDotEngineer for putting this together, this year is definitely going to be the best yet. Come say hi if you’re coming :)

Link: https://www.ai.engineer/worldsfair/2026

Follow me @realbasilchatha for everything AI agents!

@realbasilchatha Awesome track — thank you Basil and the conference organizers! Grateful to participate

@realbasilchatha Complex wording, eli5 in a phrase

@realbasilchatha Forward deployed just means writing the integration glue the enterprise's own devs gave up on. 🤷🛠️

@swyx We did this pretty early on ('20) in our customer engineering org in ProServe. It's a great model!

@realbasilchatha Forward deployed engineering is just fancy enterprise speak for "please come fix our broken prompts in prod." 🤷‍♂️

@swyx why last tweet deleted?

@realbasilchatha FDE is becoming the product in enterprise AI. the model is commodity — the person who sits with the customer and makes it actually work is where the value lives

@swyx ngl the "never done the job" makes this more convincing not less

something about admitting u dont do the work hits different

@swyx Everyone wants the domain experts until they realize true alignment requires managing egos, not just code. Is the service arm scaling the tech, or just babysitting the talent?

@swyx FDE is the new enterprise stack. It's not just consulting, it's embedding into the client's infra. Seeing the dedicated track at the World's Fair confirms it. We're moving from "how do we use this" to "this is how the work gets done."

@swyx feels like a quiet pivot: move from generalist hype into specialist delivery as the real bottleneck now

@swyx hey diem me plz

@swyx interesting to see someone build domain-specific coverage at scale without the hands-on background. bet the expert collab layer is where the real edge is, not just the playbook.