All carved in, without c4 and other formats. Design&Chill.
When i started with software architecture, i got thrown into UML, C4 and other stuff that describe how my little boxes and arrows should look like. And there were such a disaster when i tried to remember all these stuff upon designing the real system. Instead of focusing on the actual business task you end up thinking about right form of your freaking drawings.
I’ve garbaged all this nonsense. What works best, at least for a small team, it’s just gather up, and start drawing in a free form. Simple boxes for anything, simple arrows, sometimes dashed arrows for weaker connections, and picking up what sticks in the natural way. For example, we got used to writing cylinder-looking shapes for databases, pipe-looking shapes for buses and stickmen for clients. And that’s all!
Don’t focus on unimportant things: jump right into the problem and resolve it at hand, without walking around.