Working hard in the correct game is rewarding. The point made here is that if you have picked the wrong game, you are wasting your time.

So yes senior programmers currently are being rewarded very generously due to the fact that software historically had near zero marginal cost. You could have write once and sell 10 billion times.

This changed. AI now requires significant capital investment and operating expense per customer, and also there is non zero chance that it replaces programmers completely. Aka expect companies will have less appetite to reward good programmers.

So I don’t think the prospects of working hard in software engineering look very good.

You make work hard?

Are you one of my coworkers?

It's also about half AI-written slop as opposed to the natural kind, according to Pangram.