When I was first introduced to Python by my parents and left alone with it, I didn't have any idea of how software was written and didn't even really know the concept of saving code. I downloaded IDLE and it was really confusing that the place where I put my code was also the interpreter by which I ran it, and it really just didn't make sense to me at all and I never got around to doing more with it. I lost a lot of motivation because of all this confusion.

It was really the first teacher I had in high school for programming that got me on track to learn that stuff because he introduced me to the concept of doing stuff on the Linux command line. That was the first time that everything really clicked and I did so many stupid Python side projects that year just because I liked how it felt to use a more bare-bones text editor and run things on the command line, and accidentally became much better at writing software because of this.

I went on a tangent but my main point is that it often takes even just a small nudge from an external entity to even develop the desire to get started. Perhaps the OP will be successful in nudging their friend into a valuable activity and possibly career path. Perhaps it'll be a Sisyphean struggle -- many of my classmates in my first programming class learned the same material but it never quite "clicked" for them and they ended up failing the class. But I don't believe there are any inherent red flags from how OP described the situation.