I've been an enterprise architect for over fifteen years. For several of those years, I was skeptical of AI — machines don't create, they digest and produce a statistically correct response. Then I found myself building extensively with AI. Not by conversion. By necessity. My practice pushed me to structure the approach so that a local success wouldn't remain an exception. Architecture is the decision process that maintains direction over time. These decisions are made in friction with their context: exchanges with peers, challenging business ambitions against available resources, trade-offs between what's desirable and what's feasible. This friction is natural between humans. With AI assistants, it disappears — you have to design it. I propose a practice I call Friction Engineering : the deliberate design of friction between specialized AI assistants and a human orchestrator, as a quality mechanism that governs decisions before they become a specification and code.…