A few years ago, I took a week off. First vacation in months. On day two, I got six Slack messages, three “urgent” calls, and by Wednesday, the team had spun up a new feature that killed the application’s performance like a toddler on an espresso overdose: fast, chaotic, and entirely unsupervised.

That’s when it hit me: I hadn’t built a system, I’d built a babysitting job.

If your absence causes chaos, you’re not essential… you’re the single point of failure.

Too many architects fall into the same trap: chasing importance by being involved everywhere. You become the go-to person, the escalation point, the savior. You feel useful, you feel indispensable. You think you’re maintaining coherence, but in reality, you’re just exerting control. And guess what? Control doesn’t scale.
Coherence only sticks when people understand the principles, not when you police every pull request.

A good architect builds themselves out of the loop. They’re not lazy, they engineer autonomy at scale.

Your job is to architect systems and teams that don’t need you. The better you are, the quicker you make yourself irrelevant in the day-to-day chaos. Not by disappearing, but by designing autonomy into the system. Patterns emerge, decisions flow, teams move without your constant blessing.

And then, your reward is more mental bandwidth to focus on what actually matters.

You gain time to catch architectural drift before it derails strategy. You align technology with the business. You coach future architects. You shift from execution to evolution.

The trade-off is really simple : irrelevance in the daily grind buys you relevance where it counts.

A quick-fire checklist:

  • Stop babysitting decisions: document reasoning, not just outcomes.
  • Codify architecture: pipelines, templates, policies, not Slack debates.
  • Mentor relentlessly: scale yourself through people, not approvals.
  • Step away from code merges: start owning business outcomes.

Architecture isn’t about being the hero, it’s about building a system that doesn’t need saving.

Your real legacy isn’t measured by how often you show up, but by how confidently you can walk away knowing the system keeps winning without you. When your team says “we got this,” and you know they mean it, you’ve won.

Just Smile, move on, and tackle the next big mess.