I think a lot of designers pick the wrong reasons to go technical.
Yes, your T-shaped versatility will make you more employable with the ensuing LLM boom. There's no doubt that even corporations recruit for technical designers now. Just look up "Design Engineer" on LinkedIn.
Yes, you can finally get that idea out of Figma and on the app store. You can go very far with Cursor + Sonnet 4.5 since most apps are just CRUD wrappers.
Yes, you don't need to wait anymore on that SWE who's been refactoring for the past two weeks.
But more importantly, you'll stop designing mockups and start designing products.
Think about it: we have the privilege to sidestep prototyping entirely. In the atom world, there is a nonzero cost associated with each iteration. We trade steel for cardboard, circuits for breadboard because the 0 -> 1 takes time and capital. We're making that tradeoff because we can't play with the real thing. We're making assumptions that could be very wrong.
In the bits world, try skipping to the real thing. You'll first start to notice small things: that transition was slower than I expected. Semibold looks thicker than I thought. I forgot this empty state could exist. I thought the resolution would be higher. Oh, everything's pretty squished when I make the browser smaller.
Then, you start to notice the bigger things. If I navigate back, what happens -- oh shit we just invalidated their checkout. I accidentally auth'd with the wrong provider and we started creating a new account... LOADING THE QUERY TAKES 30 SECONDS WTF.
Go back to Figma and notice the uncanny valley. That's a cold 2-D collection of pixels, not a living breathing app.
There are user experiences you simply cannot account for, if you're still using cardboard.
There's another reason. What if you just got hit by a bus?
Are you okay? Good to hear. Oh, but there's this hotfix we need to push. So Tom's gonna try to design something.
Uh oh. Tom sucks at designing. "p-4" and "p-8" look the same to him. He'll use that ugly "green-600" again when I told him we're not using Tailwind colors anymore.
He didn't see anything on Figma so he decided to build a new component.
As a designer, you will never have the capacity to QA everything. Take responsibility for the bus factor. Becoming involved with the codebase (aka the only source of truth that doesn't become outdated in a few months) is the best way to set your teammates up for success. Go ahead and define the colors for them -- put /* */ comments in the CSS so they know how to use it. Create semantically defined components, so they know to pick <EmptyState/> and <LoadingState/> rather than hardcode yet another <div>. Ensure all the variants are correct -- you know no one else cares as much as you.
Go technical, and never look back.