Software Architecture as Educated Coarse-Graining

Every serious practitioner agrees that software architecture matters. Almost nobody agrees on what the word means. That's an operational problem disguised as philosophical nuisance. If you can't define what counts as architectural, you can't scope an architecture review, you can't decide what belongs in an ADR, and you can't tell a junior engineer why their "small refactor" just changed the system's failure modes. The field has definitions. None of them are wrong, exactly. But each one captures