Assistants, Not Architects: The Role of LLMs in Networked Systems Design
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. This raises a natural question: can large language models (LLMs) reliably perform this kind of architectural reasoning? We find that they cannot. While LLMs produce plausible configurations, they frequently miss critical constraints, encode incorre...
| Authors | Pratyush Sahu, Rahul Bothra, Venkat Arun et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.NI |
| Published | 28 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 28 April 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.