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This guide focuses on AI architecture review for production systems, with practical trade-offs for reliability, security, and cost.
No model until the boxes exist. Architecture review for AI features starts with data flow, trust boundaries, and SLOs on a whiteboard — not with a Bedrock model id in a ticket.
⚡ TL;DR: Draw producers → stores → gateway → model → tools → users. Mark trust boundaries and PII. Write SLOs before prompt drafts. Reject designs that skip the diagram.
AI architecture review: production guidance
text
[User] → [Product API] → [AI Gateway] → [Model]
│ │
│ ├→ [RAG index]
│ └→ [Tools / twin]
└→ [Audit log]
| Question | Fail if unanswered |
|---|---|
| Where does PII flow? | — |
| What can tools mutate? | — |
| What’s the rollback? | — |
| What’s the faithfulness SLO? | — |
| Who owns eval? | — |
markdown
❌ Starting the ADR with “We will use Claude Sonnet” before tools and tenants are drawn.
## ADR stub
### Context
### Data flow (link diagram)
### Trust boundaries
### SLOs
### Model/tool choices (after the above)
### Risks
Failure modes
Diagrams that omit the logging pipeline (where prompts land). If logs leave the trust boundary, that is a feature surface. Also omit “batch eval jobs” that share prod indexes — draw them.Closing checklist
- [ ] Diagram reviewed by security + platform
- [ ] Trust boundaries labeled
- [ ] SLOs drafted (Day 93)
- [ ] Twin/dry-run called out (Day 88)
- [ ] Model choice is last, not first
Series navigation
Day 90: Project: Incident Timeline Summarizer · Day 92: Threat Model an AI Feature Last updated September 11, 2026 Related: AI-Powered Code Review: Catch Security Issues and Architecture Violations Automatically; Day 58: Spec-First: OpenAPI Remains Source of Truth; Day 2: Transformer Attention as a Systems Diagram.Watch: 100 Days of AI on YouTube
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