Pattern 5: AI as Architectural Partner

Elevate Your Thinking Through Strategic Dialogue

Overview

AI as architectural partner means using AI to challenge assumptions, explore trade-offs, and refine your thinking through dialogue.

Why do this?

  • Test ideas before implementing
  • Discover blind spots in your thinking
  • Explore alternatives you hadn’t considered
  • Articulate and defend design decisions

This pattern helps senior developers and architects make high-stakes technical decisions. AI becomes a thinking partner, not just a code generator.

Example

Key Principles

  1. Ask for challenges - Request AI to find flaws
  2. Explore trade-offs - Every decision has costs
  3. Consider alternatives - There’s always another way
  4. Document reasoning - Capture why you chose your approach

Exercise: Collaborative Editor Architecture

Design a real-time collaborative editor and use AI to challenge every decision.

Steps:

  1. Present your design: “I’m building a collaborative editor. Planning WebSockets for updates, CRDTs for conflict resolution, PostgreSQL for persistence. What problems do you see?”

  2. Dig deeper: Defend choices or explore alternatives: “You mentioned CRDTs might be overkill. What would you suggest for a small team? Trade-offs?”

  3. Push back: “But wouldn’t operational transformation require a central server? How does that affect scalability versus CRDTs?”

  4. Document: Capture your final architecture and reasoning, incorporating insights from the dialogue.

Your Turn

Take a system you’re designing and have a 10-minute dialogue with AI about your architecture. Ask it to play devil’s advocate, propose alternatives, and explore edge cases.