Being unable to work on a codebase without AI is not necessary. Working with models you can fit on consumer hardware is already significantly more productive than rawdogging code. It's similar to "you won't always have a calculator with you" from math teachers, see how that turned out.

A way bigger problem is a codebase that you can't effectively work on with AI, which is a lot of legacy humanslop. And things that make a codebase more suited for AI, like documentation that provides relevant domain knowledge and context for requirements, automated quality control, and test coverage, also make a codebase easier to work on for a human too.

You get the same result when you calculate something by hand or with a calculator.

And that whole "legacy humanslop" paragraph is just stating the obvious with an air of spite towards humans.

People who can't bother to reason get angry when you say "hey, why put all eggs into one basket", episode N. Boring.