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AI System Design Tradeoff - PM Interview Prep
Godhuli Chatterjee
18 yr Product Leadership across Amazon (10yrs), Google (3yrs), Microsoft (3yrs)
AI did not replace system design fundamentals. It added additional reasoning
Before AI, strong system design answers already lived and died on tradeoffs: immediate vs eventual consistency, vertical vs horizontal scaling, blob storage vs relational storage, sync vs async processing.
The advent of GenAI changes the system design interview because the product architecture now includes a behavior-producing system inside the product system. PMs must reason about both the deterministic software layer and the probabilistic AI layer.