Hmm, only if 'coding' is very broadly defined? I suppose you feel you could understand the technical details of another software engineers architecture if they

Hmm, only if 'coding' is very broadly defined? I suppose you feel you could understand the technical details of another software engineers architecture if they explained it you, even if it were written in a programming language you don't know and without reading the code? If so, it's probably because you understand the features and limitations of volatile memory, persistent storage, networking, and parallelization. Which suggests its not necessarily 'coding' that matters. Learning and writing lots of code is a surefire way to become familiar with those things, but I think it's possible to become familiar with them by different means.