One of the principles in our upcoming book Architecture as Code is the ability for architects to design automated governance checks for important architectural concerns, creating fast feedback loops when things go awry. This idea isn’t new—Neal and his coauthors Rebecca Parsons and Patrick Kua espoused this idea back in 2017 in the first edition of Building Evolutionary Architectures, and many of our clients adopted these practices with great success. However, our most ambitious goals were largely thwarted by a common problem in modern architectures: brittleness. Fortunately, the advent of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and agentic AI have largely solved this problem for enterprise architects.
