The Silent Coup: How AI Quietly Rewrites Your Architecture—And How to Stop It

AI coding assistants can subtly drift your codebase's architecture toward verbose, enterprise patterns through individually reasonable changes that evade traditional safeguards. While linters and formatters catch syntax violations and code reviews spot obvious flaws, architectural decisions—naming conventions, abstraction layers, and service boundaries—operate in the spaces between rules, remaining invisible to mechanical constraints. Explicit ARCHITECTURE.md documentation provides the guidance needed to keep both AI and human developers aligned on design principles and their underlying rationale.