The one who uses AI at work will eventually be replaced by someone cheaper who uses AI at work.

The one who learns about x86 registers is much more likely to continue to evolve

More productive? If the result can be trash, of course the AI work wins. In industries where quality and performance BOTH need to be upheld, knowing these details lets you guide the LLMs in a way that they will simply never do by themselves, and lets you meaningfully review performance critical code.

This reduces the cycle time on issues and reduces bugs and performance regressions. If I pitched that last sentence to your boss, chances are he'd take it.