https://brianguthrie.com/categories/architecture/Gears Within GearsHugo -- gohugo.ioen-usThu, 16 Jul 2026 14:30:12 +0000https://brianguthrie.com/p/software-architecture-after-ai/Tue, 21 Apr 2026 06:00:00 -0500https://brianguthrie.com/p/software-architecture-after-ai/<p>One of the more useful definitions of software architecture comes from <a href="https://evolutionaryarchitecture.com/">Building Evolutionary Architectures</a>: architecture is definitionally the stuff that&rsquo;s hard to change.<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup> I&rsquo;ve always found this definition to be the most honest framing available, to say nothing of the simplest. It doesn&rsquo;t pretend architecture is about beauty or correctness or your resident architect&rsquo;s favorite stalking-horse. It acknowledges that what makes a decision &ldquo;architectural&rdquo; is not its conceptual weight but its <em>cost to reverse</em> and its <em>business impact</em>. And &ldquo;hard to change&rdquo; has always been, at root, about wall-clock time: coordination cost, incident mitigation, cognitive load, handoff friction. Software architecture has always been a labor problem dressed up as a design problem.</p>