Architecture thinking you can actually use. Every Tuesday morning.
Join 1,000+ architects & engineering leaders
Distributed systems changed architecture because the network made a function call expensive. AI does it again, except the cost is money as well as latency. Model routing is an architectural decision, not an optimization you do later.
It Passed the Test. That Doesn't Mean It Works.
Every testing, monitoring, and reliability practice you own rests on one assumption: same input, same output. An LLM in the call path removes it. What replaces it is evaluation, thresholds, and verification as an explicit architectural layer with a cost and an owner.
Read more →
When Everything Is Critical, Nothing Is
Reliability isn't only a technical property, it's an ownership property. Two decisions sit underneath every reliable system, what actually matters and who is accountable for keeping it up, and most organizations have made neither.
Read more →
What the EU AI Act Actually Requires (And What It Doesn't)
The EU AI Act's reach extends to any company whose AI system's output is used by people in the EU, no European office required. A plain-language breakdown of the four risk tiers, what high-risk systems (hiring, credit, biometrics) must actually do, and what the Act does not require.
Read more →
Scalability Thinking Has a New Dimension
AI coding assistants let teams move faster, but velocity changes the risk profile of an existing system. Boundary clarity, narrow contracts, and continuous architectural validation are what make a system evolvable at AI speed, not just human speed.
Read more →
The Difference Between AI Safety, AI Ethics, and AI Governance
"AI safety concerns" means something different to engineering, legal, and the ethics lead — and that confusion wastes meetings. Safety asks what could go catastrophically wrong, ethics asks what we should do, and governance asks how we prove we did it. Three distinct disciplines, often mistaken for one.
Read more →
From Cloud-Native to AI-Native: The Next Evolution of Enterprise Architecture
Every enterprise says it's adopting AI, the same way every enterprise once said it was in the cloud. Bolting AI features onto an existing system is the new lift-and-shift — the four-properties test for what genuinely AI-native architecture requires instead.
Read more →
Fairness in AI: Is Fairness Even Possible?
There are at least six distinct, defensible definitions of AI fairness — demographic parity, equal opportunity, equalized odds, predictive parity, individual fairness, counterfactual fairness — and a proven mathematical result shows several are incompatible with each other. Every consequential AI system has already chosen one, whether the team meant to or not.
Read more →
Why "The Algorithm Decided" Is Never an Acceptable Answer
"The algorithm decided" isn't an explanation — it's a way organizations dodge accountability for the human choices baked into a system. What accountability actually requires as an architecture: explainable decisions, genuine human authority, auditable logs, and a real escalation path.
Read more →