Yeah but when you're gone nobody is going to even be able to tell the difference between one set of code or the other. Instead the competent programmers will be replaced with tech priests preaching to the machine.

Embracing this technology eliminates competency. Consider how the art industry is currently refusing to embrace it and instead fighting it, what does this do? It ensures that the future has artists who remain competent and does not turn the field of art into a bunch of people who give prompts to an AI.

To really understand this you need to imagine a future where the art field embraced AI and all manual art stops, instead being replaced by people that give prompts to AI to make art. This is the future of the programming field by embracing AI. All future programmers when the manual programmers phase out will just be people that only know how to prompt.

It is incredibly shortsighted and only the realisation that everyone in the field will become like ai "artists" once the current experience phases out really makes this clear. It will suffer a total skill collapse.