🧬 The Pragmatic Engineer
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Featured Articles (2026)
Is the FDE role becoming less desirable?
Key Insight: Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) job postings surged 10x on Indeed in 2025, but engineers don't want the role. It's more like solutions engineering than actual software development.
According to The Wall Street Journal and Patrick Kellenberger (Betts Recruiting): "Everyone wants them and there's only maybe 10% of the market that wants that role."
Engineers who took FDE roles reported disappointment—they expected software engineering but got "IT services mindset" with engagement lead work, not development.
The Pulse: Cloudflare rewrites Next.js as AI rewrites commercial open source
Key Insight: Cloudflare rewrote most of Next.js in one week using only $1,100 in AI tokens, marking a potential inflection point for commercial open source.
Major implications:
- AI makes it trivial to "piggyback" off any commercial open source project
- The cost of rewriting existing software dropped ~100x
- Vendors will deploy "migration AI agents" to move customers
- Tests are the new moat—comprehensive test suites enable rewrites
Vercel's strategy of optimizing Next.js for Vercel deployment (undocumented build output) is now vulnerable to AI-powered competitors.
I replaced a $120/year micro-SaaS in 20 minutes with LLM-generated code
Key Insight: The author replaced a $120/year SaaS tool they paid for (with broken billing for 3 years) using an LLM in just 20 minutes.
Questions the viability of "write once, don't update later" SaaS business models when users can generate equivalent functionality with AI.
The grief when AI writes most of the code
Exploring the emotional response of software engineers when AI writes almost all code. The "grief" involved for developers as the craft changes.
About the Author
Gergely Orosz is a software engineer and engineering leader who previously worked at Uber, Microsoft, Skype, and Skyscanner. He writes "The Pragmatic Engineer" newsletter (#1 tech newsletter on Substack), hosts a podcast, and authored "The Software Engineer's Guidebook."