I think what being technical fundamentally means is to know the possibilities of
technology. My favorite example to illustrate this is Bitcoin founder Satoshi, who
I think is highly technical.
But by technical, I don't just mean Satoshi is good at writing code, which he
obviously is. More importantly, I mean that Satoshi saw a purely technical way to
solve digital scarcity without introducing third-party trust, which is what Bitcoin is.
Satoshi is more technical than I am in the sense that if you asked me in 2009
how to allow everyone to print money, I would've said you need an army and a
state to make sure currency's legal validity is protected.
Whereas Satoshi would've said, this is a technical problem that can be solved
by solving digital scarcity. I think this is the core of being technical: seeing a
world that currently doesn't exist but with certain technological breakthroughs,
can exist.
This is increasingly the way I determine if someone is technical or not:
understanding what's possible, rather than asking them technical questions I
can easily get an answer to from AI.