About
Engineers who show up at your office
FDE Műhely works with companies in Hungary, out of Budapest. We started because we kept seeing local AI projects fail — not on the technology, but because nobody had spent enough time understanding what the work actually was.
What we do
We provide forward deployed engineers to companies. In practice that means a senior engineer embeds with your team, maps how the work actually runs, decides where AI belongs at all, and then builds it — on the systems you already have.
We don't sell a platform, and we don't want to replace systems underneath you. In the overwhelming majority of cases the right answer is a layer around the ERP, CRM and document store that already work, doing the job people currently do by retyping data from one screen into another.
What we believe
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Discovery isn't the waiting room for the project. Discovery is the project.
Most AI deployments run aground because the team built on the documented process. Our first deliverable is an operating map — and it has value even if nothing gets built afterwards.
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The same person should map it and build it.
The handover between design and implementation is where information gets lost. So we don't split the role into an 'understanding' team and a 'building' team.
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A system you can't replay doesn't deserve trust.
Every step is logged: what came in, what the system decided, on what basis. That isn't an extra feature, it's a precondition for going live.
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The risk sits with the customer, not with us.
Your internal sponsor is putting their name on this. That's why we start with discovery, why the system runs in shadow mode first, and why we state the outcome in numbers.
How we got here
We started as software engineers, not consultants. Our own first deployments taught us that the technical part is the easier half: writing an agent takes days, but working out why procurement keeps three parallel spreadsheets takes weeks.
So we do it the other way round now. People first, code second. It's a slower start, and in exchange you don't have to throw everything away halfway.
Want to work with us?
We're looking for engineers who are at home on both sides: able to sit with a finance clerk for four hours and then write the system themselves. If that's you, get in touch.