My definition of Architecture (from another commenter): making a system that works almost all the time, but when it doesn't, it is not the end of the world, and easily fixable.
I spend the vast majority of my time on "architecture" (as opposed to coding) making it so that it's trivial to track down problems in production, trivial to identify the cause once you do, and trivial to deploy the solution once you've made the fix.
If you do architecture right, most fixes end up being the moral (if not literal) equivalent of one-liners. At least, that's been my experience.
Do architecture wrong (or worse: not at all) and you end up having to rewrite and/or redesign your code entirely, just to identify and/or fix bugs (i.e. not even adding new features).
Says every architect ever. Hifalutin words. So what, we build in 'flexibility' - guessing which way we plan on going in a year or two. Then in 6 months we pivot, and find we didn't anticipate that direction.
