I started coding at 10 in the mid-90s and I'm as garden variety as you can be developer-wise. I'm competent but not exceptional. While I love CS deeply and can'

I started coding at 10 in the mid-90s and I'm as garden variety as you can be developer-wise. I'm competent but not exceptional. While I love CS deeply and can't imagine my life without it, I write software for money. Once you clear the "sure I can do that without ruining the next person's life" threshold... Shrug. Learning to code early did not make me a better anything. I'm sure an adult could learn my entire childhood's worth of tinkering in 6 months to a year. And that is me being quite flattering to my younger self. Long-term professional experience on large (50k-100k loc and up) projects is where you cut your teeth. That knowledge is hard to learn, hard to teach, and hard to transform into constraints when architecting something. No ten-year-old has those skills, and learning to code young doesn't somehow predispose you to better acquiring them. I'm fairly sure I don't have them yet.