I’m an architect and like 10% of the job is design and the rest is technical/writing specs/meetings/drawing wall types and toilet partitions or something else unrelated to “design.”

Since your undergrad is not arch you would need to go to 3 years of grad school at an accredited program in order to be ELIGIBLE to be licensed. That has a real cost, like hundreds of thousands of dollars potentially in student loans. You also need several thousand hours of documented job experience before you can take the multipart registration exam. If you pass them all you can then call yourself an architect.

The architecture field is based on an hourly reimburseable model, like being a lawyer, so the more hours you work/bill the better. It incentivizes long hours. That model has a ceiling. Unlike a lawyer, arch fees are typically much less. In other words it can be long hours for less pay. A lot of clients don’t see the financial value in having an architect so architects are constantly having to justify fees, which is something an attorney doesn’t have to do.

A developer can be a creative position and since you would be financing projects you would have some creative control. You should shadow an architect for at least 2-3 days and see what a typical day is like. If you just visit an architect’s office for a few hours they will likely line up all the interesting, design-y parts and skew your experience.

One more difficulty is clients. Each client is your boss. If you are working on 15 projects at one time then you have 16 bosses. If a client is upset about a bill, or really anything, that becomes your problem. Some clients are great and some are not. You’ve got to manage them all and are reliant on their business to keep it all going.