@jerryjliu0: The future of FDE work seems closely related with all work around evals/posttraining/RL envs. FDEs are effectively resp…

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Summary

Jerry Liu shares thoughts on how forward-deployed engineer (FDE) work will shift toward defining goals, environments, and evals while automated optimization processes handle tactical implementation.

The future of FDE work seems closely related with all work around evals/posttraining/RL envs. FDEs are effectively responsible for the following: 1. Define the business problem. 2. Codify the business problem into an eval rubric and environment. 3. Hillclimb the environment and output an agent/agentic workflow that solves the business problem. Right now the process of (3) is quite manual - historically FDEs spend hundreds of hours creating bespoke software/workflows that solve the problem. But assuming intelligence is abundant, they can effectively offload (3) to some automated optimization process. This includes RL on the model layer, and using Claude Code/Codex to optimize the harness/workflow. Then the FDE responsibility shifts from implementing the task to defining the right goals and outcomes. In other words, they have access to /goal, and their job is more around making sure the goal, environment, and evals are correct vs. the tactical implementation details.
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Cached at: 08/09/26, 05:18 AM

The future of FDE work seems closely related with all work around evals/posttraining/RL envs.

FDEs are effectively responsible for the following:

  1. Define the business problem.
  2. Codify the business problem into an eval rubric and environment.
  3. Hillclimb the environment and output an agent/agentic workflow that solves the business problem.

Right now the process of (3) is quite manual - historically FDEs spend hundreds of hours creating bespoke software/workflows that solve the problem.

But assuming intelligence is abundant, they can effectively offload (3) to some automated optimization process. This includes RL on the model layer, and using Claude Code/Codex to optimize the harness/workflow. Then the FDE responsibility shifts from implementing the task to defining the right goals and outcomes. In other words, they have access to /goal, and their job is more around making sure the goal, environment, and evals are correct vs. the tactical implementation details.

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