It's funny that he presents this as a new direction. I actually interviewed with replit a couple of years back, and it was precisely their accessibility to non-professionals which interested me: the instant online editor/sandbox environment felt like it could be a good next step from Scratch, doing for software development something like what Arduino did for embedded projects. Their appeal for professionals seemed weaker, since we already have so many other options.

I strongly doubt that AI code generation will be any more of a silver bullet than any of the other "it'll be so easy anyone can do it" tools ever have been, but as an effectively infinite library of example starter projects to build on and improve, it could be quite useful.