This article examines how artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data-driven systems are reconfiguring architectural practice, authorship, and design decision-making. While framed by a deliberately provocative title, the study adopts a conceptual and critical-theoretical approach to analyze ongoing shifts in design agency and their ethical, cultural, and institutional implications. The paper argues that architectural design is undergoing a structural redistribution of decision-making authority within socio-technical routines, in which algorithmic systems increasingly participate in generating, evaluating, and selecting design alternatives, thereby repositioning the architect from a singular form-giver toward roles such as curator, trainer, and accountable reviewer of computational outputs. The argument is developed along three analytical axes. First, the concept of “the death of design” is examined as an agency shift rather than a literal end of architectural creativity, describing the erosion of singular authorship under AI-mediated workflows while explicitly distinguishing this shift from the normative commitments of human-centered design. Second, the concept of “algorithmic vernacular” explores the conditional possibility that data-driven systems may produce context-sensitive and collectively authored architectural forms, while emphasizing risks of homogenization, bias, and cultural erasure in the absence of plural datasets, transparent criteria, and participatory feedback loops. Third, “Architecture Without Architects v2” revisits Rudofsky’s thesis in contemporary conditions, where software, code, and automated production distribute authorship across human and nonhuman actors, necessitating new accountability regimes, governance mechanisms, and professional roles. Rather than advancing deterministic or predictive claims, the article presents a structured conceptual framework that distinguishes between analytical findings and normative propositions. It contends that contemporary architecture is shifting from individual authorship to collective intelligence, from aesthetic judgement to system-mediated production, and from stable authority to governed forms of distributed responsibility. In this context, the phrase “design is dead” serves as an analytical provocation, signaling a transition toward human-machine partnerships in which creative responsibility is shared, and the future of architecture depends on the governability, ethical orientation, and cultural plurality of algorithmically mediated design processes.