3 posts · forward deployed engineering, production AI, inference, evals
The prototype-to-production gap is not a model problem — it is a systems problem. Here are the four layers where AI deployments break after the demo looks great, and what to do about each one.
FDE interviews are deliberately open-ended. Most engineers freeze because they are waiting for a spec that never comes. Here is the framework that removes the freeze — a repeatable system for reasoning through ambiguous problems out loud.
The bottleneck in AI has moved from building to deploying. The engineers who win in this era are not the ones who write the best code — they are the ones who close the gap between a working model and a working system in a customer's hands.