On the other you have a non-technical executive who's got his head round Claude Code and can run e.g. Python locally.
I helped one recently almost one-shot converting a 30 sheet mind numbingly complicated Excel financial model to Python with Claude Code.
Once the model is in Python, you effectively have a data science team in your pocket with Claude Code. You can easily run Monte Carlo simulations, pull external data sources as inputs, build web dashboards and have Claude Code work with you to really integrate weaknesses in your model (or business). It's a pretty magical experience watching someone realise they have so much power at their fingertips, without having to grind away for hours/days in Excel.
I've a reasonably intense math background corrupted by application to geophysics and implementing real world numerical applications.
To be fair, this statement alone:
* 30 sheet mind numbingly complicated Excel financial model
makes my skin crawl and invokes a flight reflex.
Still, I'll concede that a Claude Code conversion to Python of a 30 sheet Excel financial model is unlikely to be significantly worse than the original.
If a data science team modeled something incorrectly in their simulation, who's gonna catch it? Usually nobody. At least not until it's too late. Will you say "this doesn't look plausible" about the output? Or maybe you'll be too worried about getting chided for "not being data driven" enough.
If an exec tells an intern or temp to vibecode that thing instead, then you definitely won't have any checkpoints in the process to make sure the human-language prompt describing process was properly turned into the right simulation. But unlike in coding, you don't have a user-facing product that someone can click around in, or send requests to, and verify. Is there a test suite for the giant excel doc? I'm assuming no, maybe I'm wrong.
It feels like it's going to be very hard for anyone working in areas with less black-and-white verifiability or correctness like that sort of financial modeling.
Any and I mean any statistic someone throws at me I will try and dig in. And if I'm able to, I will usually find that something is very wrong somewhere. As in, the underlying data is usually just wrong, invalidating the whole thing or the data is reasonably sound but the person doing the analysis is making incorrect assumptions about parts of the data and then drawing incorrect conclusions.
Can't tell you how many times I've seen product managers making decisions based on a few hundred analytics events, trying to glean insight where there is none.
I think 1) holds (as my experience matches your cynicism :), but I have a feeling that data minded people tend to overestimate the importance of 2)...
What also can help for entrepreneurship is having a bias for action. So even if your insights are wrong, if you act and keep acting you will keep acting then you will partially shape reality to your will and bend to its will.
So there are certain forces where you can compensate for your lack of rigor.
The best companies have both of those things by their side.