# What Will Remain Human in Software Architecture? A Focus Group Report

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30334 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.30334/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [Grounded Copilot: How Programmers Interact with Code-Generating Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.15000/) (2022)
- [A Large-Scale Survey on the Usability of AI Programming Assistants: Successes and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17125/) (2023)
- [Agentic Software Engineering: Foundational Pillars and a Research Roadmap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.06216/) (2025)
- [Speed at the Cost of Quality: How Cursor AI Increases Short-Term Velocity and Long-Term Complexity in Open-Source Projects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.04427/) (2025)
- [Context Engineering for AI Agents in Open-Source Software](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.21413/) (2025)
- [Big Questions on Software Architecture: Report of the ICSE 2026 BoF on Software Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.04212/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

AI development agents are increasingly used to support and partially automate software architecture tasks. To explore how practitioners perceive this shift, specifically what changes, what remains, and what new responsibilities emerge, we conducted a focus group at the 31st European Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs, People, and Practices (EuroPLoP 2026). Twenty-two participants from industry and academia discussed current practices, trust and validation strategies, the boundaries of AI autonomy, governance challenges, and implications for education. Among others, we found broad consensus that architectural decision-making, accountability, and the authoring of architectural guardrails remain fundamentally human tasks. A central emergent concept was harness engineering: the discipline of building the system that governs AI-assisted system creation, comprising validation mechanisms, knowledge lay- ers, and company-specific standards. The participants agreed that criticality, understood as the combination of uncertainty and cost of change, serves as the universal criterion for calibrating human oversight. A further concern was cognitive debt: the progressive erosion of human understanding of the system when AI-assisted decisions are accepted without full intellectual engagement. In this report, we present the findings of the focus group and describe directions for future work.