This is an absolutely false equivalency. There’s no decision making, design consideration, architecture, real problem solving, etc. when doing long multiplication.

You still need to do the decision making, design, architecture when using AI. AI is still more like a enthusiastic junior engineer. It will mindless start trying to solve a problem, copy in bad code, often makes mistakes, etc. You're still responsible for the hard problems and finding the issues. You are more of an senior/lead engineer who is doing as much thinking but not that much of the actual typing.

The question in my mind is if you need to become less productive to keep your thinking skills sharp. Do we need to separate the work from the "gym". We have times when we are using AI heavily to be as productive as possible. Then we have other times where we don't use it all to keep us sharp.

Is this necessary or are we being old fashion? I lean more towards this being necessary but if I grew up with AI, I might look at not using it as trying to write a web app in assembly. Yes, I learned it in college but there no reason to keep using it.

There is more complicated math systems that computers have solved, just like Chess, and Go. Systems that seemed impossible for a machine to beat and eventually they do.

Coding will be exactly the same soon.