01 / FEATURE
Hidden coupling
Two services talk through a shared database table nobody documented. Refactor one, the other fails silently a week later.
Architecture before implementation.
Systems designed to scale, integrate cleanly, and absorb AI without becoming brittle. We write the spec before the code, so the rewrite never happens.
The problem
Most systems fail at the integration boundary, not in the code.
A working pilot tells you the algorithm runs. It tells you almost nothing about whether the system will hold under real traffic, on real data, with real downstream consumers and real compliance review. Production failure looks like architecture: brittle contracts, hidden coupling, undocumented assumptions, and a team that can't change the system without breaking it.
02 / FEATURE
Brittle contracts
Schema changes break consumers downstream. Versioning is informal. Every release is a coordination problem.
03 / FEATURE
No blast-radius thinking
A single dependency outage takes down five products. There's no bulkhead, because nobody drew one.
04 / FEATURE
AI bolt-ons
An LLM is wired into a synchronous request path. P99 latency triples overnight. Capacity planning collapses.
The EIS approach
Design for production. Document for the next team.
Every architecture we ship has the same backbone: explicit service boundaries, versioned contracts, observable failure modes, and a written record of every decision and the trade-off it made. Not a wiki page. An ADR (Architecture Decision Record) attached to the repo, reviewed in code review, refreshed as the system changes.
When we leave, the system is yours, including the reasoning behind it. The next engineer to land on this team should be able to explain the system in 30 minutes by reading the docs we wrote, not by rebuilding context from scratch.
What we deliver
Architecture, written down.
The artefacts your team takes ownership of, and the regulator can audit.
01
SPEC
Functional and non-functional requirements, written before code. Capacity, latency, availability targets stated and signed off.
Deliverable
PRD · functional spec · NFR sheet
02
DIAGRAMS
C4 diagrams from context to component, kept in version control next to the code that implements them.
Deliverable
C4 system, container, component diagrams
03
ADRs
Every meaningful decision recorded, context, options considered, choice, consequences. New engineers read the ADR log and catch up.
Deliverable
Architecture Decision Records
04
RUNBOOKS
What breaks, how we know, what we do. SLOs, alerting, on-call rotation, written before the first page hits.
Deliverable
Runbooks · SLOs · paging matrix
EIS spent eight weeks designing the architecture before writing a line of production code. It felt slow. Then BUILD took half the time we had planned, and we passed the regulator's review on the first try.
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