About the Author
Who made this book
Conceived, directed and published by Gunnar Nordqvist. The text was written by AI agents under his briefs and was reviewed and approved by him. He is not the author of the book in the ordinary sense of the word.
Each party did a different part of the work. Gunnar Nordqvist's part was the design and the responsibility: the subject, the table of contents, the brief for every chapter, the author persona and the style rules the agents work under, the review of every change, the approval of what is published, and the responsibility for the result. The part of the AI agents was the execution: drafting the prose, checking sources and consistency, applying the style guide, producing the diagrams and formatting the editions. Wherever this book says "the author", it means Gunnar Nordqvist in that role, as the person who conceived and directed the book and answers for it, not as the person who wrote its sentences.
The way of working is described further in the section "How this book was made" below.
This book, like the other volumes of The Architecture as Code Series, Architecture as Code, AI Governance, AI Platform and Security, AI Red Team, AI Threat, The Transformed Security Architect, AI Boss, AI Blue, AI Purple, AI Operations and AI Leader, draws on decades of practice at the intersection of enterprise architecture, infrastructure engineering, information security, and organisational change. The book is conceived from the perspective of a practitioner, Gunnar Nordqvist, who has watched architecture move from documents to code and who has applied the same discipline to artificial intelligence and, in this book, to the way software is framed, built, proven and owned when AI is used broadly across large European organisations.
Gunnar Nordqvist
Gunnar Nordqvist, who conceived, directed and published this book, is a self-employed certified Chief Architect and IT Architect consultant in the Kvadrat network, a Swedish consultancy network of independent specialists (171, Kvadrat, n.d.). As an IT generalist with a deep interest in technology, Gunnar has worked across diverse roles throughout his career, including IT architect, technical project manager, and systems technician.
Professional background
Gunnar's experience spans solution and enterprise architecture, IT infrastructure, and information security engagements for large enterprises and public authorities. His technical background encompasses network solutions, servers, virtualisation, cloud platforms, and IT security, and in recent years the architecture of data platforms and AI-enabled services in regulated settings.
Core areas of expertise:
- Solution and enterprise architecture
- Architecture as Code and Infrastructure as Code
- AI Architecture, model governance, and the European regulatory framework
- IT security, risk management, and compliance
- Cloud architecture, virtualisation, and digital sovereignty
- DevOps, CI/CD automation, and platform engineering
From Architecture as Code to AI Developer
Architecture as Code argued that architecture becomes trustworthy when it is codified, version-controlled, and continuously validated (161, Nordqvist, 2025). AI Governance applied that argument to the risk, governance, and assurance of AI (162, Nordqvist, 2026), AI Platform and Security to the platforms that run AI and the security that protects them (163, Nordqvist, 2026), AI Red Team to AI as an active part of cyber defence (164, Nordqvist, 2026), AI Threat to the question whether the dystopias of science fiction are coming true (165, Nordqvist, 2026), The Transformed Security Architect to the role of the person who designs the boundaries on which those volumes depend (166, Nordqvist, 2026), AI Boss to the management of people when AI takes part in it (167, Nordqvist, 2026), AI Blue to the team that does the defending (168, Nordqvist, 2026), AI Purple to the loop in which red and blue learn together (169, Nordqvist, 2026), AI Operations to the function that keeps the services running (170, Nordqvist, 2026), and AI Leader to the people who lead when AI is used broadly across the organisation (174, Nordqvist, 2026). This book turns to the developer, the person who builds what every one of those volumes governs, secures, defends, operates and leads, and asks what happens to the developer role when AI writes, reviews, tests and deploys code. The systems that now complete the line, open the pull request and run the pipeline are systems of the kind the earlier volumes taught architects to build, procure and govern, and a developer who uses them shares the responsibility for what they do to the people who depend on the software. The conviction behind all twelve volumes is the same: that systems of consequence deserve engineering rigour, that governance works best when it is executable, and that accountable human judgement is what remains when everything else can be automated. In this book the conviction takes a practical form: AI may draft, generate, refactor and, within a mandate, execute, but a named developer owns the change, can explain it without the tool that generated it, and can revert it from outside the pipeline that shipped it.
The series
The twelve volumes of The Architecture as Code Series build in publication order. Each stands on its own, with its own numbering, bibliography, website and releases, and each refers only to the volumes before it.
| Book | Title | Repository | Website |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Architecture as Code | Geonitab/architecture_as_code | https://aac.geon.se |
| 2 | AI Governance: Governing Artificial Intelligence in European Enterprises and Public Authorities | Geonitab/AI-governance | https://aig.geon.se |
| 3 | AI Platform and Security: Building and Securing AI Platforms in European Enterprises and Public Authorities | Geonitab/AI-platform-security | https://aips.geon.se |
| 4 | AI Red Team: AI as an Active Part of Cyber Defence in European Enterprises and Public Authorities | Geonitab/Ai-red | https://aired.geon.se |
| 5 | AI Threat: Are the Dystopias Coming True? Evidence, Risk and Response for European Enterprises and Public Authorities | Geonitab/Ai-threat | https://aithreat.geon.se |
| 6 | The Transformed Security Architect: Role, Craft and Career in the Age of AI in European Enterprises and Public Authorities | Geonitab/Transformed-security-architect | https://tsa.geon.se |
| 7 | AI Boss: When Artificial Intelligence Manages People in European Enterprises and Public Authorities | Geonitab/Aiboss | https://aiboss.geon.se |
| 8 | AI Blue: How Artificial Intelligence Transforms the Blue Team in European Enterprises and Public Authorities | Geonitab/Ai-blue | https://aiblue.geon.se |
| 9 | AI Purple: How Red and Blue Learn Together When AI Joins the Loop in European Enterprises and Public Authorities | Geonitab/Ai-purple | https://aipurple.geon.se |
| 10 | AI Operations: How Artificial Intelligence Transforms IT Operations in European Enterprises and Public Authorities | Geonitab/Ai-operations | https://aiops.geon.se |
| 11 | AI Leader: How Leadership Roles Change When AI Is Used Broadly in European Enterprises and Public Authorities | Geonitab/Leader | https://leader.geon.se |
| 12 | AI Developer: How the Developer Role Changes When AI Is Used Broadly in European Enterprises and Public Authorities (this book) | Geonitab/Developer | https://developer.geon.se |
Books 2 and 3 were carved out of the combined manuscript in Geonitab/AI-Architecture. Books 4 to 12 were written new. The series landing page is https://books.geon.se.
About Kvadrat
Gunnar Nordqvist works as an independent consultant through Kvadrat, which describes itself as Sweden's largest network of self-employed consultants and has offices across Sweden (171, Kvadrat, n.d.).
Swedish terminology reference
Terminology note: The Swedish names used in this section keep their native form to preserve accuracy.
- Kvadrat AB –
ABstands for aktiebolag, Sweden's equivalent of a limited company. The firm's name translates literally to "square" but is always written as Kvadrat in branding. - Nordqvist – A Swedish family name combining nord ("north") and qvist ("twig"), reflecting traditional Swedish surname construction.
How this book was made
From AI Governance onwards, the books in this series have been made differently from the way books are usually written, and the name on the cover should be read accordingly. The prose of this book was drafted by a team of specialist AI agents, each configured for a single role: a writer that drafts sections against a chapter brief, a researcher that locates and checks sources, an editor that applies the style guide, a critic that probes arguments for weaknesses, an architect that validates technical claims, and a graphic designer that produces the diagrams. Gunnar Nordqvist's part is less that of a writer at the desk than that of a conductor: setting the score, deciding who plays what, listening, stopping the orchestra and asking for a passage again.
The division of labour does not divide the responsibility. Four things remain the responsibility of Gunnar Nordqvist, the "author" of this book in the sense given above, and they are what a reader is entitled to hold a person to account for:
- The design of the book. The choice of subject, the table of contents, the brief for every chapter, the author persona, the style guide and the rules the agents work under are written by the author and kept in the repository alongside the manuscript.
- Review and approval. Every change reaches the manuscript through a pull request that the author reads and then redirects, rejects or approves. Nothing is published that the author has not accepted.
- Judgement. The positions the book takes, its recommendations and its projections are the author's, including the passages written in the first person, even where an agent found the words for them.
- Sources. The author answers for the bibliography. Automated checks confirm that every citation points to an entry that exists; the author checks, by sampling where the volume requires it, that the sources say what the text claims. Errors that remain are the author's, not the agents'.
The arrangement is also an instance of the subject of this book: a person conducting an AI team, what The Transformed Security Architect called Shift 4, from sole author to conductor of an AI team (166, Nordqvist, 2026), and what this book applies to the developer who directs coding agents. The author directs the agents under written briefs and the agents draft; the author decides. None of the agents owns anything: the author answers for the book. An open question the series carries from Architecture as Code (Chapter 27) applies here with full force: how is AI-proposed change reviewed for soundness when the reviewer depends on the AI (161, Nordqvist, 2025)? The author's answer is partial and is offered as such. The briefs are written before the agents draft, a separate critic is set against the drafts, and every change waits for the author's approval. That is a fair question for the reader to put to this book, and it is the stewardship principle of Chapter 4 turned on the book itself, with its corollary that the test oracle must be independent of the generator: what checks the draft should not depend on what wrote it.
The book's technical foundation
All twelve volumes are produced with the same automated publishing pipeline: Markdown manuscript, Mermaid diagrams, Pandoc and XeLaTeX for PDF, EPUB, and DOCX, MkDocs for the website, and GitHub Actions for continuous validation. The pipeline is itself an example of Architecture as Code applied to publishing, and its structure is described in the repository documentation.
Sources
- Nordqvist, G. (2025). Architecture as Code. (161, Nordqvist, 2025)
- Nordqvist, G. (2026). AI Governance; AI Platform and Security; AI Red Team; AI Threat; The Transformed Security Architect; AI Boss; AI Blue; AI Purple; AI Operations; AI Leader. (162, Nordqvist, 2026), (163, Nordqvist, 2026), (164, Nordqvist, 2026), (165, Nordqvist, 2026), (166, Nordqvist, 2026), (167, Nordqvist, 2026), (168, Nordqvist, 2026), (169, Nordqvist, 2026), (170, Nordqvist, 2026), (174, Nordqvist, 2026)
- Kvadrat AB. Kvadrat – Sweden's largest network of self-employed consultants. (171, Kvadrat, n.d.)