Kimsia

Software architecture is a manifestation of the earliest design decisions about a system, and these early bindings carry enormous weight with respect to the system’s remaining development, its deployment, and its maintenance life. It is also the earliest point at which these important design decisions affecting the system can be scrutinized.

When production code is important, then it is a minority: most project code is scaffolding. Tests, deployments, linting, verification, utilities for local development, handy admin interfaces–scaffolding is code that helps us safely and efficiently change production code.

This point follows from the previous two: Architecture not only imbues systems with qualities, but does so in a predictable way.

In 2024, something shifted: AI-native apps started taking off. And we realized that our architecture was uniquely well-suited to power them. We leaned into agent-focused development, and within a few months, over 80% of databases were being created by AI agents rather than humans.

The fidelity of the system increases as extensions are added, or early versions are replaced by more complete versions of these parts of the software. In some cases, the parts may be low-fidelity versions or prototypes of the final functionality; in other cases, they may be surrogates that consume and produce data at the appropriate rates but do... See more