The Architecture of Attention

Attention is often explained as "looking at the right things." That's not wrong, but it misses the structural point.

Attention is a routing system. It decides which information flows where — a load-bearing decision in any architecture, software or otherwise.

The Structural Analogy

In a building, load paths determine what holds what. In a transformer, attention paths determine what informs what. Both are graphs of dependency.

What This Teaches

When you stop seeing attention as a math trick and start seeing it as architecture, you begin to design models the way you design buildings: with intention about flow.