🌟 Editor's Note
2025 is already coming to a close. It’s hard to believe how much progress has been made in just a year. ChatGPT launched 3 years ago, which feels like ages already. Google has reclaimed their lead in AI after many were counting them out at the beginning of the year. It’s always interesting to read predictions. Some things mentioned here at the beginning of the year seem directionally right (experimentation in AI continues with fervour), but some are still a work in progress (multimodal as the new standard). Predicting the future is hard, but comes suddenly.
It was a bit of a roller coaster year at IcePanel, in a good way. We grew the team from 4 to 8, redesigned core features like Flows and Drafts, finally removed Vuetify, and travelled across the world to meet architects. We’re ready to flip the page and continue building next year. 🚀
Our annual State of Software Architecture survey is now open. We started it last year to get a pulse from the architecture community. It takes 10 minutes to complete, and it's super easy to fill out during your morning coffee or commute. ☕
Another exciting update to share is that we partnered with Luca Mezzalira on an e-book. Communicating architecture with the C4 model was a labour of love, and we’re grateful to have collaborated with him on this. 📘
This will be our last issue before we break for the holidays. Sit back, relax, and enjoy the issue. And try not to think too much about that architecture refactor during the holidays.
Stay chill 🥶
📋 State of Software Architecture survey
We launched our annual survey on the State of Software Architecture. What are the pressing problems of architects? What tools are used? Where are things heading?
TL;DR from last year
96 people responded to the survey. Most were architects and engineers working full-time at medium (100–499) to large (5,000+) companies.
Most worked with a small team of architects, between 1 and 9.
Most respondents used diagramming (96%) and collaborative wiki tools (79%) to document their software architecture. There was a wider range of tools people used as their source of truth, from diagramming tools and collaborative wikis to informal methods. Some even had no single source of truth!
People updated their architecture at different cadences (weekly, monthly, quarterly), did formal architectural reviews once or less per year, and half of the respondents used architectural decision records (ADRs).
The most common architectural patterns used were microservices (67%) and event-driven (62%).
Most respondents were moderately or very confident in using the C4 model. Container/app diagrams (Level 2) were the most used diagram type, followed by Context diagrams (Level 1).
60% of respondents believed AI-assisted generation and maintenance of docs would have the biggest impact on the industry in the next 5 years.
What are your predictions this year? More AI usage? Architecture continuing to shift to a decentralized practice that all technical members need to own? Every response counts. Yes, we read every single one, so share your hot takes. 🔥
🧊 Design deep dives: Building YouTube
More than 120 million people use YouTube daily. Curious what system design looks like for YouTube? Check out our latest design deep dive.
Level 2 App diagram
🤓 Reads
Background Coding Agents: Context Engineering (Part 2): Spotify’s journey to building a coding agent, and why Claude Code was the best solution for task-oriented prompts. Read more.
Enterprise-wide Software Architecture as DDD Living Documentation: Nick Tune continues his series on extracting architecture context from code, this time from DDD living documentation. Learn more.
What Every Software Architect Should Know About Infra? With cloud abstracting away most infra details, it has made us less aware of critical concepts when building scaled systems. Maciej Jedrzejewski highlights key considerations for architects and engineers to prevent unforeseen problems. Watch.
AI: Will architects soon be obsolete? Eberhard Wolff argues that communication is the core challenge of software architecture and that LLMs are still unreliable guessing machines. Generating docs ≠ architecture. Read more.
AMA with Simon Brown: Simon answered some questions from the Reddit software architecture community. Read.
📚 Some holiday reading
If you care about architecture, you’ve likely seen Luca on LinkedIn, YouTube, or at a conference. He has a knack for explaining complex topics in a way that’s easy to understand. A perfect fit when we were looking for someone to write an e-book about the C4 model. We’ve admired Luca’s work for a long time and are excited to partner with him to bring this book to life.
Whether you’re new to the C4 model or have heard about it but haven’t used it in practice, this is the book for you. After reading this book, you should be ready to apply the C4 model in your organization to help everyone, technical and non-technical, understand what you’re building.
🗓️ Events
Some upcoming events to check out for architects, team leads, and engineers.
Pragmatic Summit 🇺🇸
A one-day summit hosted by Gergely Orosz, author of The Pragmatic Engineer.
Date: February 11, 2026
Location: San Francisco, USA
Confoo 🇨🇦 (we’ll be here!)
Full-stack developer conference, focused on pragmatic solutions for developers, with 170 presentations.
Date: February 25-27, 2026
Location: Montreal, Canada
Stay chill this holiday,