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Mark Masterson reminds us that people have been saying for a long long time in places like the Mythical Man Month book that system design integrity is best achieved through the work of a single mind. The alternative is design by committee, which dooms us to understanding by committee and all the inefficiency and waste that goes along with that approach. The avoidance of premature optimization almost always improves architectures by making them more comprehensible. Abstractions properly constrain the performance and functionality bottlenecks of a system to make them more comprehensible. Yet how often do we really focus on making architectures or code understandable? In what actionable way is that something you can measure and act on? So far, the best answer is simply to use fewer people and live with what they can get done. It will automatically lead to simplifications and abstractions that act as firewalls. On the other side of the firewalls are initially very simple implementations, but they are placeholders. Some chief architect decided an abstraction was needed so that there would be a place to stand with a big enough lever to move the software’s world should it be necessary.