Building houses is not the right analogy to building software, because the used techniques are known and most new buildings are going to be exactly like the mil

Building houses is not the right analogy to building software, because the used techniques are known and most new buildings are going to be exactly like the millions of other buildings that came before it, even when speaking of sky-scrapers. There's very little innovation in it. Building a new building is usually akin to copying/downloading software, only more expensive. Art is involved in designing buildings sometimes and there is some innovation for the engineers that want to break records, e.g. in building the world's tallest buildings or in building them faster, but I think those are a minority. I don't think Rich Hickey missed the point at all. If I ever saw an actual software architect, then Rich Hickey is one. I think you missed his point of view, because Rich Hickey is also the guy that helped create Clojure's Spec and is a proponent of property-based testing, which Clojure's Spec now enables. In fact Rich Hickey, in "Simple Made Easy" and other presentations, likes to talk about about the need for upfront design, for carrying about the delivered artifact, for thinking deeply about architecture, for simplification. He's in no way proposing a napkin-driven approach, quite the opposite ;-)