[gfairbanks]

> throw imaginary problems in the mix

Yes, this happens too easily. It's the crux of Ward Cunningham's original observation on tech debt discussed recently [1]. He basically said: all of you thinking you can use waterfall to figure it all out up front are deluded. By getting started right away, you make mistakes and you avoid working on non-problems. I can fix the mistakes with refactoring but you can't ever get your time back.

Most teams live in his world now. Few do too much up-front design, most suffer from piled up tech debt.

I hope you give architecture another chance. Focus on the abstractions themselves [2] and divorce that from the process and team roles [3].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40616966#40624446

[2] Software Architecture is a Set of Abstractions, George Fairbanks, IEEE Software July 2023. https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/so/2023/04/10176187/1...

[3] JESA section 1.5, https://www.georgefairbanks.com/assets/jesa/Just_Enough_Soft... "Job titles, development processes, and engineering artifacts are separable, so it is important to avoid conflating the job title “architect,” the process of architecting a system, and the engineering artifact that is the software architecture."