Zac OBryant
17 posts

Zac OBryant
@ZacObryant
Sports fan who got tired of waiting for the right app, so I’m building it. Founder of Pulse. AI enthusiast. Dad. Med Dev engineer.




After 40+ forward deployed engineering (FDE) engagements, we learned the hardest part of building AI agents and tools is Context Extraction. FDE sounds like an engineering role. It's actually 3 jobs in one: • Consulting - where in the business to build • Product - what to build • Engineering - how to build Coding is the easy part now thanks to Claude Code, @cursor_ai, and other coding agents. The hard part is everything before the code. Extracting context from clients who have it scattered across people and tools. And creating context when it doesn't exist at all. Then using that context to figure out what to build, and work with AI on architecture and development plans. FDEs turn the chaos and unknowns within every company into shipped AI applications. That's why every major AI company is building an FDE arm. OpenAI and Anthropic recently raised $5.5B for theirs. Cursor and others have several open FDE job listings. But their returns won't come from service revenue. They'll come from tokens and subscriptions. Service revenue doesn't matter to VCs, only tech revenue does because it's more scalable. Here's how FDEs make coding agent companies trillion dollar companies: Cursor and Claude Code are currently focused primarily on the professional engineer market. But the total addressable market (TAM) for coding agents is infinite because almost every job benefits from code. It just used to be too expensive. FDEs are the bridge from the technical market to the non-technical market, which is far larger. Every coding agent and LLM company will eventually automate and productize their FDE teams though. So we decided to replace ourselves before someone else does: • Voice agents run discovery interviews to find problems, map workflows, and extract expertise to train agents on • Cloud agents build prototypes, make demo videos, and collect feedback • Consultant sub-agent prioritizes AI use cases by business impact vs engineering effort The next most valuable problem for coding agent and LLM companies to solve is figuring out where to build, what to build, and how to build. Context is the solution. So if you can figure out how to extract and create context, you can make a ton of money. Coding agents can take it from there.



General Catalyst just co-led a $31.5 million seed round into a blatant rip-off of my company, Kled. (skip to 40 seconds if you want to skip context) I would typically not speak on things like this, but this level of blatant copycatting is egregious and completely unacceptable, and needs to be made an example of. This is one of hundreds of YC startups who have conducted this disgusting behavior. Unimaginative slop that continues to get rewarded due to nepotism.




















