9d • General discussion
FDEs Aren’t Building Products. They’re Translating Reality.
Small thought experiment:
Imagine the smartest AI model in the world existed today.
Perfect reasoning. Perfect coding. Zero hallucinations.
Now imagine giving it to a company where workflows are messy, people explain problems differently, processes live in random spreadsheets, and half the knowledge exists only in someone's head.
Would the AI alone solve anything?
Probably not.
This is why I think FDEs are interesting.
Not because they write code.
Because they're becoming translators.
One language = what users say they want.
Another language = what users actually need.
And those two are often completely different.
Customer:
"We need a dashboard."
Reality:
"We actually need fewer meetings."
Customer:
"We need AI search."
Reality:
"Nobody can find information quickly."
Customer:
"We need automation."
Reality:
"Our process is broken."
The crazy part?
The highest leverage work often isn't building faster.
It's discovering the real problem hiding underneath the request.
Maybe the future of engineering isn't just building.
Maybe it's becoming insanely good at translating chaos into systems.
👇 Curious:
What's a time when the real problem turned out to be completely different from what people originally asked for?
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FDEs Aren’t Building Products. They’re Translating Reality.
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