feat: embed a stranger in your codebase

I read the AWS forward deployed engineering announcement on a Tuesday morning. Palantir has been doing this for over a decade. And guess what? OpenAI does it, also Anthropic does it. A billion dollars from AWS means this is now the default way enterprise AI gets adopted at scale.

But here's the question nobody asks in the sales meeting: when a vendor's engineer ships code to your production system and then goes back to their company, who owns that code on day one thousand?

This episode isn't "is forward deployed engineering good or bad." It's about the incentive structure. A forward deployed engineer is optimizing for platform adoption, renewal milestones, and a good case study. Your team needs a system that's still legible in three years. Those are different goals. And if you don't name that mismatch before the engagement starts, your team will be the ones writing the postmortem.

I also cover the four questions I'd ask before signing. Not a framework. Just what I'd actually say in the room.

If you've ever inherited code from someone who wasn't building for your team's future, this one's for you.

Topics: forward deployed engineering, enterprise AI adoption, vendor management, engineering leadership, accountability, technical debt, AWS, AI platform, Palantir

Links

• Substack: https://chaotictoejam.substack.com
• Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/chaotictoejam.bsky.social