His advice on the use of auto seems perfectly sane to me. The first time I learned about a language with type inference for local variables was D, and coming from C++/Java, I had the same reaction. I absolutely hated it. However, the D community seems to overwhelmingly prefer auto/const/immutable/etc. (any of these can be used in place of an explicit type declaration in D), and over the years as I've worked with other languages that have adopted this convention, I find that I now cannot stand any unnecessary explicit type declarations in my code.

Nearly 100% of the time, you know what the type of a local variable is (otherwise people would be unable to use Python/Ruby/Javascript/etc.), so it's no great harm to readability. Furthermore, you are probably already working with an IDE that can tell you the type of a variable when you hover over it, anyway. I think that it also leads you to think more about interfaces than specific types.