Forward Deployed
Forward Deployed explores the intersection of AI, software development, and the enterprise. Hosted by Noah Brier, the show likely features conversations with builders, operators, and leaders working at that crossroads. It examines how AI is reshaping software teams, products, and large organizations. The podcast is aimed at people interested in the practical realities of deploying AI in business.
Episodes
Forward Deployed, Episode 11: Memory Is Only Half the Equation
Kasey Klimes joins me to talk about what happens when agents make production cheaper but make shared understanding harder to preserve.Kasey is the founder of Primitive, which describes itself as decision infrastructure for software teams. It captures decisions as teams build, shares them with the team, and checks later work against them. Our conversation starts with the product and the problem und
Forward Deployed, Episode 10: The Medium Is the Agent
Andrew McLuhan joins me to talk about what happens when AI is not only a tool that produces content but a new medium that changes how people perceive, work, and organize their lives.Andrew runs The McLuhan Institute, the organization he started to carry on the work of his grandfather Marshall McLuhan and his father Eric McLuhan. We started with a small observation from Andrew’s post about language
Forward Deployed, Episode 9: Brave New Work for Agents
Aaron Dignan joins me to talk about a pattern he recognized while building AI workflows at Plumb: “I’ve just created a newsroom.” Once agents have roles, decision rights, tools, inputs, and handoffs, you are not just designing software. You are designing an organization.Aaron has spent two decades helping organizations change without calcifying. He founded The Ready, wrote Brave New Work, built Pl
Forward Deployed, Episode 8: The Factory Has To Prove It Works
Justin McCarthy joins me to talk about what happened after he told a team to stop writing code—and then discovered they had to stop reading it too.Justin is the founder of Diffusion and the former co-founder and CTO of StrongDM. His team at StrongDM built one of the clearest examples of a working software factory: humans define goals and the shape of the feedback system, while agents do the implem
Forward Deployed, Episode 7: The Diffusion Clock and the Conversion Clock
James Cham joins me for what is basically one of our recurring AI freakout calls, recorded.James is a partner at Bloomberg Beta and one of my favorite people to talk to when a new model or workflow suddenly makes the world feel slightly miscalibrated. Back in 2024, he and I recorded AI & The Enterprise with James Cham for the BRXND newsletter, which covered AI cycles, opinionated enterprise softwa
Forward Deployed, Episode 6: Market Mechanisms for Agents
Welcome to episode six of Forward Deployed. Noah sits down with Rohit Krishnan, author of Strange Loop Canon, to talk about what happens when we take the word “agent” seriously.Rohit brings together AI, markets, economics, organizational theory, and simulation. The conversation moves from principal-agent problems to enterprise world models, data-first ontologies, MarketBench, model self-knowledge,
Forward Deployed, Episode 5: Aligning Agents
Welcome to episode five of Forward Deployed. Noah sits down with Taylor Pearson to continue the conversation about how we align agents, and why the best models may come from outside traditional software engineering.Taylor brings a background that cuts across history, internet businesses, The End of Jobs, risk parity investing, complexity science, and recent deep work with Claude Code. The conversa
Forward Deployed, Episode 4: The Special Forces Model
Welcome to episode four of Forward Deployed. Noah sits down with Chris Papasadero to explore the deep parallels between Special Forces operations, enterprise software deployment, and creative direction—and what all of it means for building AI agents that actually work in the real world.Key Topics Covered* The Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) model: How Palantir’s approach to embedding technical exp
Forward Deployed, Episode 3: Context Engineering
Welcome to episode three of Forward Deployed. Noah and Lance dive deep into context engineering—the art and science of filling context windows with just the right information for agents to take the next action.Key Topics Covered- Context engineering: Why Karpathy’s term matters more than prompt engineering for agents- Three core techniques: Reducing context, isolating context, and offloading conte
Forward Deployed, Episode 2: Claude Code Skills and the Progressive Disclosure Problem
Welcome back to episode 2 of Forward Deployed. This week Noah and Lance dive deep into Claude Code skills, a deceptively simple feature that’s changing how we think about building AI agents. Noah walks through the Alephic CLI he’s been building and reveals a wild hook-based routing system using Cerebras at 3,000 tokens per second.Plus: Why Andreessen thinks AI isn’t the Internet redux.Key Topics C
Forward Deployed, Episode 1: The Bitter Lesson
Welcome to the first episode of Forward Deployed (YouTube), a podcast exploring the intersection of AI, software development, and the enterprise.We’re very excited to have you join us as we tackle the wild world of Forward Deployed engineering. We hope to make this a roughly bi-weekly show and look forward to inviting guests in the future. The idea is to dive deep into the realities of making this
