About the FDE Lab

Production AI work is different from demo work. Field engineering, in the style of forward deployed engineering, means scoping ambiguous customer problems, defining reliability bars, building under constraints, evaluating against frozen criteria, and communicating what can and cannot be trusted. The lab publishes Field Challenges and Field Reports to make that work visible.

Challenges are self-serve. Labels are public by design. There is no leaderboard. Honest failure analysis matters more than score. New challenges unlock when the previous one has five completed Field Reports.

Have a production-shaped problem that deserves a challenge, or want to review a rubric or a Field Report? Email info@theairuntime.com.

The FDE Lab is the engineering arm of The AI Runtime, the publication and community for engineers shipping AI to production.