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# Your Distributed System Just Got a Brain. Now What?


- **Date:** Thursday, Jul 9, 2026
- **Time:** 10:40–10:50 (10 min)
- **Room:** Airstream 2
- **Event:** World Congress 2026 Europe

## Recording

[Watch recording](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/100017-your-distributed-system-just-got-a-brain-now-what)

## Description

Distributed systems were designed around predictable behavior.

Retries assume idempotency. State transitions assume determinism. Consistency models assume repeatable outcomes.

Then we added AI.

Now:
- the same input may produce different outputs
- retries may change decisions
- context mutates state unpredictably
- model upgrades alter behavior silently
- deterministic workflows depend on probabilistic components

Your distributed system just got a brain.
And distributed systems don’t tolerate ambiguity.

In this session, we explore what really changes when AI becomes part of a distributed architecture.

We’ll cover:
- how probabilistic inference breaks retry semantics
- why idempotency assumptions fail with LLMs
- separating state from inference
- deterministic checkpoints in AI workflows
- replayable execution paths
- handling model version drift
- designing hybrid architectures where AI proposes - but systems enforce

AI doesn’t just add intelligence. It changes the fundamental assumptions of your system design.

If you treat AI as just another microservice, your architecture will eventually collapse.

## Speaker

### [Marcin Makowski](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/@marcin-makowski)

CEO of BeOne


## Related talks at this congress

- [Best Practices for AI-Assisted Development of Distributed Systems](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/events/world-congress-2026-europe/sessions/1228-best-practices-for) — Przemysław Ładyński
- [Production AI Is a Systems Problem: How ML Breaks at Scale and How to Prevent It](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/events/world-congress-2026-europe/sessions/1010-production-ai-is-a) — Elle S
- [Building Modern Distributed Systems using Less AI Tokens](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/events/world-congress-2026-europe/sessions/998-building-modern) — Przemysław Ładyński
- [Architecture 3.0: From 90% to 99.999% Reliability in Building AI Systems](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/events/world-congress-2026-europe/sessions/1211-architecture-3-0) — Ingo Eichhorst