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?
Longer answer: About 10 years I moved into leadership roles (VP Eng) and while I continued to write code for POCs, it hasn't been my primary role for quite some time. DDIA has been a book I pull out often when guiding leaders and members of my teams when it comes to building distributed systems. I'm writing more code these days because I can, and I still reference DDIA and have the second edition preordered.