I agree with your assessment, but we both know that humans try to find the “shortcut.” One of the things that AI promises—and which tool doesn't have these two magic characters in their promise, even though that might be a lie?—is that you get the “easy button.”
“Just give me the app, and don't tell me what's behind it … I don't want to know the mess.” That is obviously a recipe for disaster.
Even in our robot-overlord future (I hope not), we will still need humans to make sense of the “Lego bricks” that these discovery tools give us. And definitely I don't want any LLM that makes up words without thinking (just guessing) making decisions that impact humans and organizations.
But then … I might be in the minority with that opinion.
I don’t think you’re in the minority. The shortcut temptation is real, but hiding complexity doesn’t remove it, it just postpones the consequences.
You’re also raising a very common challenge in EA. The “easy button” expectation is often the same one architects face: that we just deal with high-level boxes and arrows. But those boxes only make sense if someone understands what sits behind them.
At the EA level, the job isn’t to replicate all that detail. It’s to understand it sufficiently and aggregate the insights upward into something decision-makers can actually use.
The sad truth is that somebody is just the EA team because nobody else has a vested interest in maintaining current state in a common language that is most useful to the enterprise architecture team. Great article.
I agree with your assessment, but we both know that humans try to find the “shortcut.” One of the things that AI promises—and which tool doesn't have these two magic characters in their promise, even though that might be a lie?—is that you get the “easy button.”
“Just give me the app, and don't tell me what's behind it … I don't want to know the mess.” That is obviously a recipe for disaster.
Even in our robot-overlord future (I hope not), we will still need humans to make sense of the “Lego bricks” that these discovery tools give us. And definitely I don't want any LLM that makes up words without thinking (just guessing) making decisions that impact humans and organizations.
But then … I might be in the minority with that opinion.
Nevertheless, a nice article :-)
I don’t think you’re in the minority. The shortcut temptation is real, but hiding complexity doesn’t remove it, it just postpones the consequences.
You’re also raising a very common challenge in EA. The “easy button” expectation is often the same one architects face: that we just deal with high-level boxes and arrows. But those boxes only make sense if someone understands what sits behind them.
At the EA level, the job isn’t to replicate all that detail. It’s to understand it sufficiently and aggregate the insights upward into something decision-makers can actually use.
The sad truth is that somebody is just the EA team because nobody else has a vested interest in maintaining current state in a common language that is most useful to the enterprise architecture team. Great article.
Yes, that is a common challenge. High-end tools and being active as an architect may help. Glad it resonated!