What then happens is that the architecture conversations start happening wherever
and whenever they are needed. Harmel-Law referred to case studies: the InfoQ
article Empowering Teams: Decentralizing Architectural Decision-Making and the
article Decentralizing the Practice of Architecture at Xapo Bank.
In these circumstances, the role of "architect" is spread across your organization,
and those who traditionally played this role step back into the roles of advice-giver,
context-provider, decision-coach, and conversation-curator, Harmel-Law said. The
practice of architecture spreads to those who need to practice it, supported by those
with relevant experience:
As someone who has played a traditional "architect" role in the past, it’s exhilarating
to experience.
Using the architecture advice process, anyone can make any architectural decision,
as long as they seek advice from:
Those who are affected
Those with expertise
Adopting the Architecture Advice Process is a revolution; It’s a return to the first
principles of software system design, with the focus on the practice of architecture
becoming the right conversations between the right people at the right time, Harmel-
Law explained:
This practice will emerge in a way that is unique to you, your colleagues, your
existing systems, your customers/clients, the overall evolution of technology, and
your market, and more.
Harmel-Law mentioned that there are some major failure patterns to look out for:
"Bad decisions" - specifically senior people stepping in to stop decisions from
happening.
"Old guard == new guard" - the same (senior architects) are still doing all the
deciding.
"Off the radar decisions" - decisions being taken in private or without following the
process (e.g. not seeking the appropriate advice, or recording this all in an
architecture decision report [ADR]).
No trust - people not trusting each other to follow the process, and not being
accountable for their decisions that result.
Initially, difficulties will likely arise when participants struggle to shed their older
mental models, Harmel-Law said. Consensus is no longer required, and advice-
offerers are not giving "permission" for the decision. That continues to lie with
whoever initiates the process for the decision at hand. It is perfectly acceptable if the
advice that is offered is not taken into account in the resulting decision.
Harmel-Law gave an example of a team that wants to decide on a new platform for a
service they are writing. The options are a set of lambdas, a microservice running on
a Kubernetes pod, or a collection of bespoke compute nodes:
A systems architect offers advice on the lambda-option, writing it as a comment on
the ADR in question. They state that in their experience, lambdas will be slow to start
and make state-management more difficult. While understanding these concerns,
the team can still decide to pick the lambda-based option. They remain accountable
for the decision. While they have hopefully understood the systems architect’s
concerns, they are not bound to follow them.
This changes not just the practice of architecture, but also the mental models of
those who practice it. It changes it from being an exercise in hierarchy, closed, semi-
secret knowledge, and power-plays into one of knowledge sharing and shared
experience, Harmel-Law said. It devalues personal knowledge stocks ("I know
something valuable that no one else knows and therefore I have power") into
collective knowledge flows ("we all benefit from the right information being available
to the right people at the right time").
GitHub's latest dive into Octoverse 2025 data reveals something developers might
not consciously realize. AI coding assistants aren't just changing how quickly
developers write code. Moreover, these assistants influence which languages
developers choose in the first place.
TypeScript's massive 66% year-over-year jump to become GitHub's most-used
language isn't just about framework defaults. GitHub Developer Advocate Andrea
Griffiths calls it a "convenience loop," and it works like this: when AI makes a
technology feel frictionless, developers flock to it. That creates more training data,
which makes the AI even better at that technology.
By August 2025, TypeScript had overtaken both Python and JavaScript to claim the
top spot on GitHub by monthly contributors, 2.636 million developers, according to
GitHub's Octoverse 2025 report. It's the biggest language ranking shake-up in over a
decade. Sure, frameworks like [Link] and Astro defaulting to TypeScript helped. But
there's a deeper technical reason why TypeScript plays so well with AI.