I banned code.

I’ve written code in ten languages. This year I banned my team from writing any.

That should hurt me more than it does.

Assembly. Fortran. Pascal. SPSS, SAS, Stata, SQL. MATLAB. Python and R. Years spent getting fluent in languages most people have never heard of.

The easy call would have been to protect that. To keep hiring for it, keep rewarding it, keep pretending the ground wasn’t shifting.

But leadership isn’t defending the thing that made you. It’s being honest about what your team needs next, even when it costs you the thing you’re proudest of.

So I made the call. My job is to move the team to where the work is going, not where I was most comfortable.

Writing code by hand is going the same way Assembly already did. The machine does it faster, at any hour, and it doesn’t get tired at 4pm.

So if the typing isn’t the skill, what is? Knowing what to build. Knowing when the output is wrong. Knowing which problem is worth solving at all.

AI can write the code. It can’t tell you that you’re solving the wrong problem.

My job now is to build a team that frames the problem, not one that races the machine at typing. That judgement is the part the machine still can’t do.

We didn’t ban code to stop people thinking. We banned it so they’d start.