Field Notesby Bartosz Frąckowiak, solution architect
Field Notes
Software architecture, with the people left in. An architect's notebook from fifteen-plus years of distributed systems in production: the decisions behind the boxes and arrows, who owns a boundary, why a migration never starts, and what changes when agents write the code.
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15+ years in productionPhD, Univ. of WarsawTop 3% on ToptalArchitect, global SaaS
Nobody Resisted
We planned for skeptics and got 1,372 skill files in eleven weeks. Notes on an AI adoption that went too well.
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Pick where to start
People problems, dressed as technical ones
Ownership gaps, decision rights, and the org chart hiding inside your architecture. For architects and tech leads who keep fixing the same "technical" issue that never was one.
- 01Nobody Owns the Sum5 min
- 02Decisions Have an Architecture Too5 min
- 03The Anti-Corruption Layer Is for People Too5 min
Running AI adoption at real scale
Fifteen squads, several hundred developers, one transformation: the tech radar that drives it, the metrics that survive contact with reality, and the architecture practice that grew out of both.
The whole mapOne person, three products, AI agents
Field reports from shipping my own products solo, with AI doing the typing: what actually changes, what breaks, and the receipts to prove it.
- 01A Company of One, Staffed by Agents5 min
- 02The Diagram That Cannot Lie5 min
- 03Edge Cases Written by Parliament5 min
Recently published
2026.09.28 · The agentic operating model, part 1Every Approval Is a Missing Rule
If the architects do not write the rules the agents read, the person who writes the template does. Notes from reviewing an operating model for agentic delivery.7 min
2026.09.14 · Diagrams, part 3Turn the Sequence Diagram on Its Side
The people who can tell you a boundary is wrong were never going to read UML. Turn the sequence diagram on its side and they do not have to.8 min
2026.09.07 · Reviewability, part 2We Deleted the Wrong Half of Agile
Reviewability is something you design. Extreme Programming already knew how, and we made exactly the wrong half of it optional.8 min
2026.08.24 · Decisions, part 3Design the Stopping Point
Target state is the easy half of a solution design. The hard half is the first step, because that is usually where the money runs out.6 min
2026.08.17Count Your Rejections
A friend passed every round and still did not get the job. Nothing was wrong with him. The company simply had no seat that quarter.6 min
2026.08.10 · Adoption, part 1Adoption Is the Deliverable
The ugliest service in production beats the most elegant one nobody calls. So where exactly does an architect's job end?6 min
2026.08.03 · Reviewability, part 1The Bottleneck Moved
AI made writing code cheap. Our squad reports show where the queue went next: to the people who have to read it.6 min
2026.07.27 · Invent the least, part 2A Feature Is Not a Service
The ticket said "saved filters". The real decisions were which service, whose identity, and how little to invent.5 min
2026.07.20 · Invent the least, part 1The Model Is the Easy Part
I put an MCP server in front of a production API. The hard parts were tokens and state, not the model.6 min
2026.07.13Mathematicians vs. Lawyers
Two thinking archetypes I keep meeting in architecture rooms, and why your system needs both.5 min