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Could agents estimate architectural significance from dependency impact and migration cost before proposing code, rather than after generating it?

All architecture is design, but not all design is architecture. Architecture represents the set of significant design decisions that shape the form and function of a system, where significant as measured by cost of change.

As such, remember that coding agents are reasonably good at transforming prompts into code…

…but they are not particularly good at making decisions that balance the static and dynamic forces on a system in order to yield a reasonably optimal solution: this is where human judgment, human understanding, human knowledge, and human experience shine.

The trap is assuming cheap generation means cheap modification. An agent will happily couple two internal schemas with 200 lines of glue just to turn a local test green. Without hard interface boundaries, systems calcify around whatever glue the model threw together first.