I don't think these are exclusive

I personally found out that knowing how to use ai coding assistants productively is a skill like any other and a) it requires a significant investment of time b) can be quite rewarding to learn just as any other skill c) might be useful now or in the future and d) doesn't negate the usefulness of any other skills acquired on the past nor diminishes the usefulness of learning new skills in the future

As someone with 20 years experience, DDD is a stupid idea, skip it and do yourself a favour. You'll probably be forming some counter-arguments in your head. Skip them, throw the DDD books in the bin, and do your co-workers a favour.

I'm doing a similar thing. Recently, I got $100 to spend on books. The first two books I got were A Philosophy of Software Design , and Designing Data-Intensive Applications , because I asked myself, out of all the technical and software engineering related books that I might get, given agentic coding works quite well now, what are the most high impact ones? And it seemed pretty clear to me that they would have to do with the sort of evergreen, software engineering and architecture concepts that you still need a human to design and think through carefully today, because LLMs don't have the judgment and a high-level view for that, not the specific API surface area or syntax, etc., of particular frameworks, libraries, or languages, which LLMs, IDE completion, and online documentation mostly handle. Especially since well-designed software systems, with deep and narrow module interface, main…