After two years of telling developers they'd be obsolete, the AI industry has created a new job. It's called a consultant. You can't make this up. They are calling it a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE), which sounds considerably more exciting than "consultant" and likely pays considerably more than either.
Months of marketing and fearmongering – developers are irrelevant, replaceable, finished – and this month both Anthropic and OpenAI launched consultancy companies. The framing? An engineer who sits inside a client's organisation, figures out what they actually need, and builds it. With AI.
To be fair, the problem the FDE solves is real. Enterprise clients know their own constraints – the compliance rules, the legacy architecture, the edge cases that never made it into any documentation. The AI labs know how models actually behave in production – the prompting patterns, the failure modes, the things that work beautifully in a demo. Neither side has the other's knowledge. You need both to build something that runs.
No one in custom software is surprised. It seems software does not actually install itself into complex organisations after all. Turns out you need an actual human. Who knew.
For the indiemakers, founders, small teams – there's something worth sitting with here. If the biggest AI labs in the world can't close the gap between “model works” and “model ships in production” without sending humans in to hold enterprise hands, that gap isn't closing any time soon. The opportunity was never in the model. It was always in knowing the domain deeply enough to make the thing actually work.
That's a craft. It's also, it turns out, a job.
Forward deploy yourself.
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