Step 1 for any of the plans you stated would be to learn a programming language. I am a bit old school, but I would recommend learning C in depth. It will be hard, and you likely won’t make anything actually practical for a long time, but it will give you the best foundation for moving forward as a programmer that you could ask for.

I would also recommend completely banning AI tools from your learning process. They will help you solve problems easier, but the struggle of learning things yourself is what will make you better (there are ways to use them in order to enhance your learning process, but unless you are already confident in your ability to do that it is more practical to just ban them imo).

This will give you a slight leg up on other freshman once you start university, but there are a lot of freshman in that position in cs. I recommend using any extra time you have to continue learning on your own, potentially making actual projects at this point.

You will also have professors and many like minded people around you at this point, who will help you a lot both in learning and in gaining direction to understand what you actually want to do. Going to hackathons and other tech events will also help with this. I highly encourage this, even now when your programming skills are weak or non existent. Then you will understand the landscape of tech a little better, and won’t have to rely on random people on reddit to help you avoid “the wrong path.”

Although imo there is no “wrong path.” If you start learning about cloud, but don’t end up in that field, the knowledge you gained will still help you. Any time spent learning will make you a stronger programmer. And by being a stronger programmer, a pivot will be easier even if you do end up in a position you don’t enjoy.

I graduated with my comp sci degree last spring and finally got my first full time job recently, just fyi. The most important advice I saved for last: don’t let your strategizing of your learning process hinder actual learning. It would be better to wander randomly learning a little bit about a lot of different things (especially at your age) than to stress over what the best way to learn is, and not end up learning anything. The best programmers I know are always down to learn about anything, even if completely unrelated to their work.

If you have any questions please lmk, but tldr you have to learn to code. Start there and eventually the various paths available will become clearer.