I think in your mental model lies the very popular misconception that humans are any good at coding, and that architects were able to do their jobs because they were sitting on top of competent operators.

I’d argue that this is wholly untrue. In fact, for 30 years the software development field has produced mountains of sociology and processes designed to coerce good software out of idiots writing arbitrary code. Idiot subordinates is the baseline here, not an anomaly introduced by AI.

I’d even go further and say that current gen AI is marginally better than the average developer so as an architect you’re still herding cats but the cats are marginally less crazy than they were, say, 10 years ago. The methods are roughly the same : deep roadmaps, shallow sprints, frequent iterations and constant supervision. It’s not ideal but it has produced all the software known to man, including critical life-or-death stuff.

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