Though I wish I was entirely kidding. ~12 years ago or so we did that if one of two parallel development teams had to modify a message of the network protocol to avoid incompatibilities and merge problems.

Mind you, these were SVN merges. I can't even verbalize my feelings about SVN merges but by a mixture of laughing and groaning in pain, like if you stubbed your toe in a painful, but entirely funny way.

Yes, they do. Git itself is also developed that way.

Btw, you don't need to use format + send-email, send-email calls format-patch under the hood

AI is more like the early web. There is definite value that people can see, but no one really knows how to monetize beyond the incredibly obvious 'sell people access to it', so everyone is throwing spaghetti at the wall waiting for it to stick. When someone gets it to stick, there will be a giant amount of money coming at them, but until then there will be a ton of people with sauce all over their faces looking like idiots.

If the business is afraid to let you email the customer, you might need to work on your communications skills and go through some intentional demonstration efforts. For example, "Good morning <boss>, here's a draft of what I think we should send <CTO's name @ customer> regarding their feedback on the last build.".

That's literally all it takes to get into the game. Don't ask for permission to write the draft because then your managers will think it's gonna be this big ordeal and they'll definitely say no.