I’m a (fairly competent/successful?) mid-career product manager at a respected company in the enterprise AI space. No complaints or issues and I make great money for manageable WLB (no family)

But I have always had a burning curiosity to understand the “how” at a deeper level. I studied CS and started as an engineer for a couple years before pivoting

For most of my career, I could carve off 10-20% of my time or use weekends to stay fresh and fulfill my technical curiosity

But with coding agents, the pace of technological change, and new fundamental system design principles being defined seemingly every day, I can no longer keep up

I want to move back to being an engineer (probably L4-level) so I can really focus on the craft. My sense is that this is an inflection point in history for a valuable new skillset, while my PM-coded abilities to do user research, earn trust with stakeholders, and have business sense are something that I can maintain on the side.

Is this crazy? Am I going into a career field that will disappear in 24 months? Will I be unable to find a job as a PM after switching randomly to a software engineer for 2 years?