Forward-deployed engineering and corealization
It is funny how ideas come around again. Forward-deployed engineering (FDE) is superficially similar to work I did some 20-25 years ago on Corealization.
We were bringing IT work into the workspace back then, a manufacturing plant control room in my case. No pre-set agenda, just an interest in solving peoples' problems with anything from a bit of advice to a small hack to a new system that is compatible with their way of working. That was in a small research group in Edinburgh, working with an engine manufacturer in Germany. Then "Agile" and life happened, so the idea did not take off.
I am not sure I care much about FDE as a go-to-market strategy for VC-funded AI shops. What is more interesting is that I see job ads calling for people to work in-house, traveling around different departments and doing Corealization-style work to help address issues of all sorts and sizes. This may well be a trend enabled by coding agents. If done with care, this could be one of the ways that LLMs could actually make a positive impact on peoples' work and the health of the wider economy outside the big IT companies.