To be clear, I think young people need to learn traditional software engineering skills too (.. maybe having the wrong attitude towards it is even worse than the aptitude!) A junior with no foundational SWE skills will just become a meat wrapper. But thinking more about it I wouldn't discredit these "AI skills" so much. A lot of it is either using AI as a force multiplier or learning the specific skills around deploying it which I'd still categorize as 'AI skills'

building agents is just a completely different ballgame, theres a lot of infra and harness engineering around handling the nondeterministic behaviors that are nonobvious unless you've shipped agents at scale

I'm not discrediting them as being of no value, I am just discrediting the notion that devs who are unable to find work now should be beefing up their AI skills so that they can get a job in the future. "AI skills" as they are talked about are easier and quicker to pick up than working with a library, e.g. React. And if they are not difficult to learn, then they are not a differentiator nor should they be treated as such.