Of course talent+effort are better than either alone, but it seems strange to argue that there will be zero effect on the value of having just one of them. AI may not raise the talented lazy person straightforwardly above the hard-working grinder but it seems likely that it will alter their relative position, in favor of talent.

What does it mean to even say "having just one of them"? I think the false dichotomy just torpedoes the ability to predict the effect of new tools at all. There's already a world of difference between the janitor who couldn't learn how to read but does his best to show up and clean the place as well as he can every day and the middle manager engineer with population-median math or engineering abilities but a 12-hour-day work ethic that has let him climb the ladder a bit. And the effect of these AI tools we're considering here is going to be MUCH larger on one than the other - it's gonna be worse here for the smarter one, until the AI's are shoveling crap around with human-level dexterity. (Who knows, maybe that's next.)

Anyone you'd interact with in a job in a HN-adjacent field has already cleared several bars of "not actually that lazy in the big picture" to avoid flunking out of high school, college, or quitting their office job to bum around... and so at that point there's not that same black-and-white "it'll help you but hurt you" shortcut classification.

EDIT: here's a scenario where it'll be harder to be lazy as a software engineer already, not even in the "super AI" future: in the recent past, if you were quicker than your coworkers and lazy, you could fuck around for 3 hours than knock something out in 1 hour and look just as productive, or more, than many of your coworkers. If everyone knows - even your boss - that it actually should only take 45 minutes of prompting then reviewing code from the model, and can trivially check that in the background themselves if they get suspicious, then you might be in trouble.