Show Notes
Coding Chats Episode 77 — Arnaud Fournier, Forward Deployed Engineer at OpenAI, talks to John Crickett about how AI is fundamentally reshaping software engineering. He explores how OpenAI's own engineers have largely moved away from writing code line-by-line, shifting instead to what he calls "harness engineering" — orchestrating agents, preparing context, and steering AI to do the heavy lifting.
The conversation covers practical ground for engineers at every level: how to successfully adopt agentic coding in your workflow, best practices for integrating tools like Codex into enterprise environments, and what it's really like to work at the frontier of AI deployment across industries like semiconductors, life sciences, and finance.
Chapters 00:00 Understanding the Role of Forward Deployed Engineers 03:21 The Integration Process: Challenges and Solutions 06:25 Optimizing AI Solutions with Codex 09:38 Leveraging Codex for Team Efficiency 12:28 Best Practices for Using Codex in Engineering Workflows 15:29 Setting Up for Success in Enterprise AI Projects 18:26 Navigating Stakeholder Engagement and Requirements 21:16 The Future of AI in Enterprise Solutions 25:53 Building Proof of Concept Solutions 28:33 Collaborative Development and Model Improvement 30:45 The Rise of Codex and User Adoption 33:36 Integrating AI into Software Development 36:10 Standardization vs. Customization in AI Tools 39:05 The Evolving Role of Forward-Deployed Engineers 42:48 Understanding the FDE Role at OpenAI 46:10 The Recruitment Process at OpenAI 49:50 Exploring Related Content 49:58 Outro Final Coding Chats.mp4
Arnaud's Links https://www.linkedin.com/in/arnaudfrn/ https://openai.com/index/introducing-openai-frontier/ https://community.openai.com/t/introducing-the-new-codex-for-almost-everything/1379125 https://openai.com/index/scaling-codex-to-enterprises-worldwide/
John's Links: John's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johncrickett/ John’s YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@johncrickett John's Twitter: https://x.com/johncrickett John's Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/johncrickett.bsky.social
Check out John's software engineering related newsletters: Coding Challenges: https://codingchallenges.substack.com/ which shares real-world project ideas that you can use to level up your coding skills.
Developing Skills: https://read.developingskills.fyi/ covering everything from system design to soft skills, helping them progress their career from junior to staff+ or for those that want onto a management track.
More from Coding Chats
Coding Chats Episode 83 - In this episode, VB from OpenAI’s developer experience team explains why he thinks plan mode is obsolete and how coding agents have shifted from step-by-step instructions to outcome-driven, long-running work. We cover how to write a good agents.md, why tests still matter when agents write the code, spec-driven development, and why cloud agents may be the future of dev tooling.
Coding Chats Episode 82 - John talks with Dave Westgarth, head of delivery at a Databricks consultancy. Dave shares his path from a psychology degree and McDonald's into tech, and they discuss why the Scrum Master role is so misunderstood, how it differs from a delivery manager, and whether either needs to be technical.They also look at how AI is changing delivery work. Faster code just moves the bottleneck upstream, John argues there's no AI-specific skill you can't learn in a day, and engineering fundamentals are what make AI useful.
Coding Chats Episode 81 - Ben Howdle talks to John Crickett about being a first time CTO in a start-up. Ben, author of The First CTO, shares what changes when you move from building technology to leading a technical team: the pressure, the trade-offs, and the realization that writing code is only part of the job.Drawing on startup experience and lessons learned the hard way, Ben discusses how to balance quality against runway, manage people, and communicate technical decisions in terms that founders and other non-technical stakeholders can understand. He also explores why resourcefulness, resilience, and comfort with ambiguity matter so much—and why CTOs often spend more time selling ideas than they expect.Whether you’re stepping into your first CTO role or leading a technical team at an early-stage company, this conversation offers candid insights into the realities of technical leadership.
Coding Chats Episode 80 - start-up advisor Alexander Berkovich shares his expertise on building successful start-ups, hiring strategies, CTO roles, and the importance of communication between technical and business teams. Discover practical tips for navigating the challenges of early-stage companies and how to align technical excellence with business goals.
Coding Chats Episode 79 - Richmond Alake, Director of AI Developer Experience at Oracle, joins John to discuss agent memory — how AI agents store, retrieve, and adapt to information. He argues that developers building memory on flat files are naively reinventing the database, and that once you factor in concurrency, security, and scalability, a proper database is inevitable. The conversation covers the full memory stack and how Oracle's AI database keeps embeddings and data together without shipping sensitive information to external providers.