The fixed point between what you want and what gets built.
“Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.”
Why the name
Mochlion comes from mochlos (μοχλός), the ancient Greek word for a lever. Greek was the language Archimedes spoke, and the lever is at the center of the line above.
Every organization with an idea is Archimedes, trying to move something bigger than itself. The lever has never been longer: AI development tools can now write software remarkably fast, and anyone can pick one up.
But a lever with nothing under it is just a stick. Point an AI coding tool at a vague idea and you get the wrong software, sooner. What makes the lever work is what it rests on: a fixed, trusted point that everyone has agreed on. For software, that point is knowing exactly what to build, with the contradictions settled and the decisions written down. That's what we make, so the lever in your hands has something solid to push against.
Automate chaos and you get chaos, faster.
Mochlion exists to prevent that.
Most software projects don't fail in the code. They fail in what the code was told to do. The standard process runs an idea through meetings, a requirements document, user stories and a backlog, and then into sprints, where developers discover the questions nobody answered. Every one of those questions becomes a meeting, a clarification and a round of rework, sprint after sprint.
AI coding tools make the build faster, but they make every mistake faster too. An AI will build exactly what it's told, contradictions included. When the process underneath is incomplete, AI doesn't fix it. It automates it.
Mochlion puts the hard questions first. Every expert is asked, the answers are compared, the contradictions are settled, and the decisions are written down, all before the first sprint. Agile still runs the build. It just stops doing the discovery, which makes it more agile.
See today's process next to oursA new name for an old job
A forward deployed engineer (FDE) works inside the business, next to the people who do the work, deploying new AI capabilities for business advantage: money made, money saved, lives and safety improved. FDEs are all the buzz right now, but technology has always been good at rebranding old ideas.
When businesses first put real-time transaction systems on IBM mainframes with CICS, they had the same problem: powerful new technology, and a business that couldn't see how to use it for an advantage. The answer then was the business analyst, or the analyst who could also code. Then and now, people who understand both the business and the technology, and how an enterprise really works, are unicorns.
Our founder was an FDE before the term existed, under the titles of the day: systems analyst, software engineer, systems engineer, developer, maintenance developer, project engineer, program manager, and buyer of Big Four consulting. The common thread across every one of them: teams building things the business didn't need, and missing things nobody thought to ask about.
The fix back then was Joint Application Design (JAD) and Joint Requirements Engineering (JRE): live, in-person sessions with the business and IT in one room, working out what a system had to do. They worked. They also took forever.
Forty years of software and systems development are built into Mochlion. The thinking hasn't changed. The logistics have: every expert answers privately, on their own time, and the gaps and conflicts are checked as the answers come in. Mochlion exists to bridge the gap between the business and its FDEs.
What we've learned
Mochlion is built on lessons learned the expensive way, inside organizations large and small.
“That's what I asked for, but not what I wanted.”
The business described a process, the developers built it faithfully, and it still missed. What people say in a meeting and what they actually need are different things, and nobody notices until the software is in front of them.
The knowledge is in twenty heads, not one.
Every process is understood in pieces. Put everyone in one room and the loudest voice wins, the quiet person holds the exception that breaks the system, and most of the room spends the hour waiting for their five minutes.
Builders want to build.
Software engineers are at their best in the code. Asking them to also run discovery with a room full of business experts spends their weakest skill on the most important step.
Requirements with no code, and code with no requirements.
Look at any system old enough and you will find both: rules someone wrote down that were never built, and behavior that was built but traces back to no decision. Both happen when nobody records who decided what, and why.
Fast-built software still needs an owner.
An application built in days still has to be run for years. A handful of them can strain a technology team that never agreed to own them, so ownership gets settled before the build, not after.
AI has made building software much faster and cheaper, and that makes every one of these problems bigger, not smaller. When an application can be built quickly, knowing what to build becomes the expensive part. So Mochlion does one thing. We turn what an organization knows into a specification a team can build from with fewer surprises, and we hand it to the people who will build it and live with it. We don't build it, and we don't run it. We want a thousand applications built right, not a thousand applications to maintain.
Have an idea worth building?
Tell us about it. One application, one price, and a specification your team can build from.
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