Books written by AI is yet another case of an application of AI that does nothing to solve existing problems that consumers have (too few books in this case) but instead focuses on the producer side of things.
Worse yet, increasing the quantity of books while simultaneously decreasing the quality just makes the situation worse for readers: more slop to filter out.
> worth keeping in mind that there is more to programming than just programming.
As a side note, this is what I keep pointing out when people talk about code generated by LLMs. As an activity, this is just one thing that programmers do.
I think the answer to your question (a good question indeed) is "both", or rather to balance development of both capabilities. The decision of how to spend time won't be a single decision but is repeated often through the years. The Staff+ engineers with whom I work _mostly_ excel at both aspects, with a small handful being technical specialists. I haven't encountered any who have deep domain knowledge but limited technical depth.
Worse yet, increasing the quantity of books while simultaneously decreasing the quality just makes the situation worse for readers: more slop to filter out.