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?
The market for small batch locally made produce is huge. Entire grocery stores dedicated to local organic offerings is the standard in every upper middle class neighborhood on the entire west coast. The reason is obvious: a salad made with crappy tomatoes is a crappy salad.
We aren’t at this point in software yet because most consumers of software have no taste
I think you’re right about the analogy itself, though it’s far from clear that society owes it to your grandma to hinder everyone’s access to cheap tomatoes just so she can feel more useful for her tomato-growing abilities.
The AI is enabling a lot more experimentation with software. The AI supplies the tomatoes (infrastructure / grunt work), grandma tries her recipes (the software / business idea).
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).
People didn't stop solving sudokus when sudoku solvers appeared.
Many people have argued over the years that it would be great when we have an economy that takes care of all the labor and everyone in society is free to choose to spend all of their time on things that have no financial incentive.
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.