The term "forward deployment engineer" is everywhere right now, Palantir popularized it, Anthropic is leaning into it, and every data and AI platform seems to be packaging it as their answer to the last mile problem. But what is it, really? Michael Wharton, VP of Engineering at Kung Fu AI, joins Sid and Lee to cut through the noise. They dig into where the FDE model works, where it falls short, why process matters more than the individual, and why buying the platform and buying the deployment help are two very distinct purchases. They also get into token maxxing versus quality, the bimodal split happening across engineering teams right now, and why the speedup from agentic coding tools is probably more modest than most leaders think.