Rework rarely announces itself. It shows up disguised as productivity — a revert here, a "fix:" follow-up there, a branch quietly closed and re-cut on a new base. Each looks like a small course correction. In aggregate, they are the single largest tax on a delivery stream, and in an agentic one — where an AI author ships fast and there is no default human reviewer standing between the model and the merge button — they compound faster than anyone expects.

Every services firm runs on the same hidden equation, whether or not anyone has written it down: revenue is a function of headcount. To grow, you hire. To take on more work, you staff up. To protect margin, you push utilization. The whole apparatus of an agency, a consultancy, or a professional-services firm is a machine for converting human time into invoices, and the better you run it, the more cleanly that conversion happens.

A forward deployed engineer (FDE) is a senior engineer who embeds directly inside your team, learns how your business actually works, and ships the first working solution in your real environment — not a slide deck or a proof-of-concept that dies in a demo. The model pairs product-grade engineering with on-the-ground context, so what gets built solves the problem you actually have.

The change was forty lines. An AI agent wrote it to fix a proration edge case in the billing service — mid-cycle plan upgrades were rounding a day wrong. A senior engineer reviewed it the way good engineers do, line by line. The logic read cleanly. The variable names were sensible. The diff did what the ticket asked. She approved it, it merged, it shipped on a Thursday afternoon.