The question of "will people pay" is answered--OpenAI alone is at something like $4 billion in ARR. There are also smaller players (relatively) with impressive revenue, many of whom are profitable.
There are plenty of open questions in the AI space around unit economics, defensibility, regulatory risks, and more. "Will people pay for this" isn't one of them.
Honestly, I've not coded in 5+ years ( RoR ) and a project I'm involved with needed a few of days worth of TLC. A combination of Cursor, Warp and OAI Pro has delivered the results with no sweat at all. Upgrade of Ruby 2 to 3.7, a move to jsbundling-rails and cssbundling-rails, upgrade Yarn and an all-new pipeline. It's not trivial stuff for a production app with paying customers.
The obvious crutch of this new AI stack reduced go-live time from 3 weeks to 3 days. Well worth the cost IMHO.
There are plenty of open questions in the AI space around unit economics, defensibility, regulatory risks, and more. "Will people pay for this" isn't one of them.