This new AI role is exploding (News)

What's up, nerds? Shabay. I'm Jared, and this is Change Log News for the week of Monday, 11/10/2025. So Spencer Chang made a thing, a thing that made my day. It's called the alive Internet theory, and it makes the case that the Internet will always be filled with real people looking for each other, answering calls for help, and sharing laughs even in the midst of arguing. This is a website that's better felt than tell'd. So I'll just leave you to follow the link in the newsletter. Okay. Let's get in to this week's very alive news. This new AI role is exploding. AI related job losses and future nonhires 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. More 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. Younger 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 e c two. 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. His explanation for the discrepancy, it's generational. Quote, this feels generational to me. 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 …