Corollary: this is the best possible time for semi-technical non-engineers to catch up. Over the last 3 months, I went from someone who was a "technical PM" to ridiculously proliferous at shipping massive amounts of (what appears to be) quality code. Systems thinking + domain expertise are now FAR more important than the syntax of individual lines of code. In fact... getting caught up in the lines of code might actually be a hinderance. For context: I learned C++ in high school, then I was an Excel-monkey in my consulting days (but building complex models over 10-20 weeks that were basically data applications). I forgot any form of syntax over the last 20 years but the other experiences meant I built strong foundations in object-oriented programming, proper abstractions, systems thinking, and data structures. And I've spent most of my career in Finance, Biz Ops, Legal, HR... which means that I can be monstrously productive in building software for corporate finance teams. How productive? 500k+ LoC touched and hundreds of commits, in 11 weeks. Yes, yes, I know lines of code is not a KPI to optimize, but someone going from 0 to that order of magnitude should still paint a picture. And this isn't slop. It's reviewed by actual engineers on the team, and we're rigorous about PR reviews (in the earlier days I had to redo PRs from scratch many, many times because it wasn't good enough). The overall process works beautifully, because I have the multi-year product roadmap and the codebase architecture in my head. I'm able to consider future needs, and execute on a months-long roadmaps... in days. I genuinely feel like I just got access to a video game I've been yearning to play, for a long time... and somehow my copy came with God mode baked in. (This is funny because Andrej Karpathy is actually a god in this space and I'm probably just getting used to the power of building software, and just a teeny bit of Dunning-Kruger to boot...) But still. I share this because I chatted a few days ago with a close friend who's a really sharp systems thinker but not an engineer, who said "I feel like I missed the wave, it's too late for me to pick up vibecoding." I told him that I only began working in our codebase in earnest in early October. That things are changing so fast that those who previously learned to code are having to sprint really hard to keep up, too. That knowing the line-by-line syntax isn't the most critical for *most* products. That the game is changing every week... but that's a huge gift people like us, because it gives us a place to stand in order to move the world. And most of all, that if you're a systems thinker, have good taste in UI/UX, have domain expertise, and — I think this is somewhat important — that you love software... there is absolutely nothing stopping you from building something amazing. I *love* software. I thought several times about taking a detour to learn how to code, but life just never slowed down enough. Ironically, it was the practice of coding speeding up that gave me the opportunity to get on board. However long this lasts, I feel so fortunate to be able to actually get in there, and build something that I love.