Tech Ability Important in AI Era

The AI era just made technical ability matter again. And I mean for everyone, not just engineers.

Early days at Oursky, we used IRC and TWiki for internal comms. Worked great when the team was all techies. But as we grew and hired designers and business people, I pushed us to migrate to HipChat (later Slack) and Quip (later Notion). Why? Non-tech folks kept complaining that IRC and Markdown were “too difficult.”

I believed SaaS would advance fast enough that these tools would become commodities. User-friendly for everyone.

Fast forward to 2026. With AI tools everywhere, I’m seeing the opposite trend.

People who are comfortable with Markdown, who think and write logically, who can navigate n8n workflows, who understand the CSS behind vibe code? They’re exponentially more productive with AI than those who don’t. The gap is widening, not closing.

Right now, LLMs are in the terminal era. The GUI moment (like DOS to Windows) hasn’t happened yet. We don’t know how long that’ll take. Could be years.

If it is years, then teams with people who can handle “terminal-level” interfaces, Markdown, logical writing, and code literacy have a real edge.

If you’re building a team that wants an edge in the AI era, technical ability and logical thinking aren’t nice-to-haves anymore. They’re the foundation.