Assistants, Not Architects: The Role of LLMs in Networked Systems Design

arXiv:2604.25506v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Designing the architecture of modern networked systems requires navigating a large, combinatorial space of hardware, systems, and configuration choices with complex cross-layer interactions. Architects must balance competing objectives such as performance, cost, and deployability while satisfying compatibility and resource constraints, often relying on scattered rules-of-thumb drawn from benchmarks, papers, documentation, and expert experience. T