I banned code.

I’ve written code in ten languages. Last month 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. I spent years getting fluent in languages most people have never heard of, and a fair few they have.

And I’m telling you the skill I spent years building is fading. Writing code by hand is going the same way Assembly already did. The machine does it faster, it does it 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 actually worth solving in the first place.

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

Hand it a sharp, well-framed problem and it’s extraordinary. Hand it a vague one and it will build you the wrong thing — beautifully, and fast. The bottleneck has moved from writing the code to knowing which code is worth writing.

The years I spent learning to write code weren’t wasted. They taught me how to read it, question it, and spot when something’s off before I can even say why. 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.