>the barrier to entry is now monetary rather than just knowledge-based, which will make it _much_ harder for young people with no money to pick up.

Considering opportunity cost, a young person paying $20 or $100 per month to Claude API access is way cheaper than a young person spending a couple of years to learn to code, and some months coding something the AI can spit in 10 minutes.

AI coding will still create generations that even programming graduates know fuck all about how to code, and are also bad at reasoning about the AI produced code they depend on or thinking systematically (and that wont be getting any singularity to bail them out), but that's beside the point.