I don't think that fully captures the situation.

My mother plants tomatoes in her garden. She invests a lot of work into them, only to get a few tomatoes a year. Clearly it is not an economic effort; clearly she is doing it out of passion, not for the actual value of the tomatoes.

However, imagine the plants stopped yielding tomatoes, and would never do so again. Would my mother continue working on her tomatoes? I do not believe so.

I believe that even if you are doing a craft purely out of passion, it is still important to gain value out of the fruits of your labor, be it ever so little.

I don’t see the analogy? AI is not preventing the craftsman programmer from coding. Your compiler hasn’t stopped “yielding fruit”, so to speak.

The correct analogy would be, your mom can also just go to the supermarket and get much cheaper mass-produced tomatoes; which is… exactly the current situation?

I agree with your analogy, but I don't understand the last part. If I'm working on a hobby project, say a video game, the "tomatoes" I get are the experiences of writing code, playing a level I designed, and sharing it with my friends. The advent of AI doesn't reduce the value of those experiences or make them go away.

In this analogy, your mother probably gets enjoyment out eating the tomatoes herself, or maybe giving a few to friends. Technology wouldn't cause her plants to stop growing. But she couldn't support herself full-time as a tomato grower competing against large farms with hydroponics.

So maybe the extension is that professional SWEs who work at big corporations will need to use AI to 'keep up', but hobbyists can still get enjoyment out of their own work at hobby scale without using AI (similar to the point in TFA).

I think it captures it perfectly, and the question is what are tomatoes here. Is it being challenged intellectually and proud of solving a puzzle, or is it getting praised, valued or paid?

People didn't stop solving sudokus when sudoku solvers appeared.