I think if you stop labelling it "AI" and instead use "meta-software" or "natural language programming tools", then all of the hidden and externalized costs resurface. And a better understanding of skepticism arises. These tools may cost $20/month now but once all of the tooling to write software manually vanishes or becomes rarified, will the price stay the same? And will not the purveyors of this meta-software have a new form of control? Will intelligence itself be somehow sequestered?

Probably not because what "AI" is giving you is not intelligence. Intelligence involves realizing that all human knowledge is fiction, careful, logical, predictive fiction. And "intelligence" involves remembering in exquisite detail what makes your knowledge fiction, so that you do not inadvertently become convinced that your careful logical predictive fiction is "truth".

Predictions about "AI" involve various super exponentials combined and if you leave out just one of those that pulls in the wrong direction then the loose renormalization performed by wishful thinking fails. So rather than an "AI" programming utopia we end up in the same old efforts to manifest hegemony over computing, will to power. One algorythm to rule them all...the more things change the more they stay the same.