This new AI role is exploding (News)

0:28What's up nerds? sharing laughs even in the midst of arguing. This is a website that's better felt than tellt, so I'll just leave you to follow the link in the newsletter. Okay, let's get into this week's very alive news. This new AI role is exploding. AI-related job losses and future non-hires are the talk of the software town right now, but at least in the short slash near term, a new AI-led tech role has emerged with a massive increase of job postings, up 800%, over the last nine months. Quote, forerunners in the AI race such as Anthropic and OpenAI are actively recruiting software engineering specialists called forward deployed engineers, FDEs, to help with tailoring AI models to meet customer needs.

1:20More than just working with back office coders, these engineers are embedded within customer and product engineering teams. End quote. Still not sure what a forward deployed engineer or an FDE does exactly? Quote, unlike traditional software engineers, FDEs go beyond writing code to go out in the field and understand where AI can make the biggest impact. Their mission is to bridge the last mile of AI, transforming a general purpose model into scalable AI solutions that reflect complex client requirements and solve their problems, end quote. If this trend has any staying power and if you want to be in demand in 2026, now is the time to ensure you can confidently and truthfully put FDE on your resume.

2:06Younger devs won't tolerate pain in the AWS. Corey Quinn, who is hilarious by the way, finally realized what I've known since the first time I tried shipping a Rails app on EC2. AWS, for the uninitiated, it's pure pain. Quote, recently I was spitting up yet another terribly coded thing for fun because I believe in making my problems everyone else's problems and realized something that had been nagging at me for a while. Working with AWS is relatively painful. End quote. Corey lays out what a typical zero to one AWS setup often requires, then compares it to the silky smooth experience Vercel provides on top of AWS.

2:46His explanation for the discrepancy, it's generational. Quote, this feels generational. For folks of a certain age, Gen X and millennials, AWS and GCP have made their bones. We came of technical age with the platforms, and we are used to their foibles. Azure is of course the boomer cloud, but Gen Z is using platforms that aren't designed as tests of skill to let customers prove how much they want something. End quote. Hat tip to Corey for calling Azure the boomer cloud. That's amazing. However, I don't think this is a generational thing. There's an entire group of elder devs like myself who have always preferred Heroku-style deployment platforms over AWS.

3:28While his view of the past seems skewed from inside the AWS bubble, he might be right about the future. Quote, AWS spent two decades building the most powerful cloud platform in the world. They may spend the next two watching it become irrelevant to anyone who wasn't already bought in. You should write an agent. Thomas Toczek makes the case that to truly grok LLM agents so you can be the best hater or stan that you can be, you need to write one. Quote, Agents are the most surprising programming experience I've had in my career. Not because I'm awed by the magnitude of their powers. I like them, but I don't like like them.

4:08It's because of how easy it was to get one up on its legs and how much I learned doing that. End quote. I had this experience back in April when Thorsten Ball's post walked me through it step-by-step. Thomas isn't wrong. Building an agent for yourself brings clarity to what is likely the most important developer-facing technology of the decade. It's now time for sponsor news. Why GitHub Actions slash checkout is slow for 98.5 % of orgs. Depot just dropped another deep dive and this one hits home for anyone using GitHub Actions. They analyzed thousands of workflows and found that 98.5 % of orgs are running actions slash checkout slower than they need to.

4:51Turns out the default settings most teams use are not great. Cold clones, missing shallow fetches, and bloated histories waste precious CI minutes. And this is before your build even starts. Depot's post breaks down why this happens, how much time it's costing you, and what you can do to fix it. The takeaway? CI performance isn't just about bigger runners. It's about smarter ones. Depot's obsessed with shaving seconds off every step, and this new data proves there's a ton of low-hanging fruit hiding in your pipelines. Read the full breakdown at depot.dev and see why speed matters more now than ever.

5:28Full link to the blog is in the newsletter. Dead Framework Theory Paul Kinlan says he was wrong last October when he predicted that LLMs would abstract away framework choice. Well, maybe he wasn't wrong, but he was wrong about the timeline. Quote, The reality is more interesting and more permanent. React isn't competing with other frameworks anymore. React has become the platform. And if you're building a new framework, library, or browser feature today, you need to understand that you're not just competing with React. You're competing against a self-reinforcing feedback loop between LLM trading data, system prompts, and developer output that makes displacing React functionally impossible.

6:10End quote. When he says self-reinforcing feedback loop, he is not exaggerating. Today I learned Replit, Bolt, and tools like them are literally hard-coding React into their system prompts. Quote, they have to. If you're building a tool today to attract developers, you need to give them code they can maintain. And code developers can maintain now means React for the vast majority of web developers. End quote. I remember back in 2022 when Josh Collinsworth declared React isn't great at anything except being popular, and he even debated this with us on the pod. Turns out that being popular might be all it needed.

6:48Stop vibe coding your unit tests. We're still trying to figure out this whole agentic coding thing. Should we make the agent write the tests and we write the implementation ourselves? Or should we write the tests and make the agent write the implementation? Or maybe we should just sit back and say, hey, agent, take the wheel. Andrew Gallagher has thoughts on these questions. Quote, there is a growing sentiment that LLMs are good for crud, boilerplate, and tests. While I am not so sure about how good AI is at making crud or thumping out boilerplate, a year of working as an SWE in the modern LLM-powered AI codescape has proven to me that LLMs write unconstructive, noisy, brittle, and downright bad unit tests.

7:30Please, do not vibe code. your unit tests, end quote. Andrew does say there's a way to get good tests from LLMs, but right now it requires you to make them right tests one at a time. Ain't nobody got time for that.

7:50That's the news for now, but go and subscribe to the Change Log newsletter for the full scoop of links worth clicking on, such as reviving classic Unix games, off-grid, long-range, decentralized mesh networks, and what is so special about MCP. Get in on the newsletter at changelog.news. Last week on the pod, Andrew Nisbet told us all about the world of open source metadata on Wednesday, and on Friday, we played a heated game of Pound Define with our previous champs. Coming up this week, it's Hacker News' favorite blogger, Sean Gedeke. Have a great week, like, subscribe, and five-star review us if you dig the show, and I'll talk to you again real soon.