One follow-up question I’ve been thinking about:

In the AI era, is it still worth spending significant time reading deep CS books like Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann?

Part of my hesitation is that AI tools can generate implementations for many distributed system patterns now. At the same time, I suspect that without understanding the underlying ideas (replication, consistency, partitioning, event logs, etc.), it’s hard to judge whether the AI-generated solution is actually correct.

For those who’ve read DDIA or similar books, did the knowledge meaningfully change how you design systems in practice?