Scholastic philosophers taught that body and soul were two components of the SAME entity, the human being, and that both were good because they were created by God. One good essence with two components, in other words. And while they claimed that the soul component was immaterial, that absolutely did NOT mean that the soul was not part of the natural world. To claim this is to seriously misunderstand their view of the physical world. To them, matter was only one component of creation.

The strict mind/body dualism was not introduced by medieval Scholastics, but rather by the advent of modernity in Descartes, and developed further by Kant and other enlightenment philosophers. In other words, this is very far from being a medieval problem - on the contrary, it a problem created by modern philosophy.

As for the author's equation between subjective experience and qualities of things, or his equation of processes in the brain with the mind itself, this just ignores the facts. Qualities we observe in nature are obviously distinct from the feelings they produce in us in many cases (beauty, sublimity, injustice, etc. produce distinct feelings like reverence, humility, anger), and if the mind were equivalent to brain processes, then certain powers of the mind that we obviously have would be impossible (such as our ability to reflect on those very same brain processes in ourselves).

Writing code has always been a means to an end of getting the job done, and I consider being really interested in the practice of coding to be a bit odd. It's as if a carpenter got really into manual saws and got upset about an electric power saw because he "loves manual saws". Whether or not an AI spec is "code" really shouldn't matter if you're a software professional. You are designer/engineer of software systems, not a "coder".