Mindful Software Engineering

An AI that writes code without a plan is a technical debt generator. In Part 2, we explore Operational Roles — splitting AI into Architect and Developer modes to ensure every feature is designed, diagrammed, and validated before a single line is written.

Part of a System Architect’s job is to choose tools that balance reliability, maintainability, and speed. In this post, I lay out the stack I’ll use across the blog — Terraform for IaC, Ansible for configuration, and Eraser.io → Mermaid.js for design — and the eight-question Systems Architect filter I’ll apply to every project.