>We need tools that bring the learning curve down and allow people to develop their own basic tools to make their lives easier

This won't achieve much because the issue is that most people can't think about the problems they face in a structured way.

Modern programming isn't hard, all you need to learn is a handful of control structures and how to do I/O, and there are a multitude of tools to take away the tedious bits.

But if you can't describe the problem you are trying to solve in a structured way than no non-AI tool will help.

P.S. I remember being considered a Wizard in a non-technical university course because I looked up some Excel tutorials and built a spreadsheet with some basic calculations and graphing. This wasn't technically hard, but most of my classmates lacked the ability to comprehend the relationships between different cells and tables in Excel.