Why Smart Engineers Build Stupid Systems--The Thing Your 10x Engineer Can't Do

AI may surpass human capabilities in software architecture due to its superior vigilance and capacity for pattern matching at scale. While conventional wisdom favors human architects for holistic thinking and judgment, architectural failures often stem from lost context, not flawed judgment. Engineers face cognitive constraints, such as limited working memory, making it difficult to maintain a comprehensive view of exponentially growing codebases. Examples, such as abstraction concealing cost and fragile abstractions, highlight how individual, reasonable decisions accumulate into systemic problems. AI systems, with their vast context windows and consistent rule application, can overcome these limitations, though humans remain essential for novel decisions, business context, and cross-system integration.