Architecting

Etymology

from Gk. arkhitekton (master builder) + the well-documented engineering habit of drawing boxes with arrows before writing any code; attested in spinner logs wherever someone asked Claude to 'set up a system'

Definition

The phase in which Claude produces an elaborate internal blueprint for a solution, typically resulting in a structure of impressive complexity that satisfies all requirements except the ones the user actually had. The diagram is always correct; the code is aspirational.

Diagram

  ┌──────┐   ┌──────┐   ┌──────┐
  │Svc A │──►│Svc B │──►│Svc C │
  └──────┘   └──────┘   └──────┘
       └──────────────────┘
    (user wanted: print('hello'))

Usage

"The model spent 11 seconds Architecting a microservices solution for what was ultimately a 40-line Python script." - Postmortem: The Invoice Parser Incident, 2024

See Also