An artificial intelligence (AI) router sits between your app and the model providers and decides, per request, which model answers. "Router" names three different jobs — a gateway, a fallback chain and a smart router — and each hands over more of a decision that used to be yours.
The plugin built, packaged and published on the first try. I could not have explained the packaging step to anyone, and I shipped it anyway. After several months of building games, static sites, libraries and plugins with an artificial intelligence (AI) assistant doing most of the typing, that sentence is the whole story: producing code stopped being the hard part, and something else moved into its place.
When a coding agent writes most of the code, reading every diff stops being realistic, and "reading diagonally" — skimming — becomes the default. It is a real bet, not a safe one: architecture doesn't break in any single diff, it erodes across all of them, and skimming checks exactly the part that was never the problem.
A practical tour of the diagram types that earn their place in engineering documentation — when to reach for each one, and how to keep them maintainable.
In software development, managing dependencies and state is crucial for ensuring deterministic behavior: for any given input, we aim for a consistent output (This is a key reason behind the growing hype for functional programming, as it emphasizes immutability and stateless functions, simplifying the management of dependencies and state). However, as the number of inputs and modules increases, so does the complexity of handling them, potentially leading to a higher risk of bugs—unintended outcomes. To mitigate this, it's essential to minimize and manage dependencies effectively, acknowledging that they can introduce similar challenges by increasing system interconnectedness and potential failure points.
Model–View–Controller (MVC), Clean Architecture, Hexagonal and Vertical Slices keep getting compared as if a team had to pick one. They answer different questions at different levels of a system, and most real codebases use several at once without noticing.