I'm part of the old guard too, and I like the process itself, but I also like the result. I just think his arguments why to avoid AI sound like they're taken from an academic brochure, not like fact-based assessment grounded in relevant practical experience. Casey frames the choice as a binary: either you write every instruction yourself, or you lose the craft; he completely misses that there might be a third path where the craft is expressed at a higher level of abstraction. He stated that he likes to write assembler; but he also likes to write in higher-level programming languages; same for me, and I don't see a contradiction or a need for a binary decision. There were indeed arguments in the seventies and eighties that "real programmers don't use high-level programming languages"; at the time there were good reasons for this arguments because optimizing compilers were in their infancy; so it was a fact that true performance depended on human ingenuity. Now we are back at a similar discussion, just on a different level.