Fear of forgetting when using AI

I've been using AI assistants for at least a year now. Mostly Github Copilot, but also Cursor on private projects.

One thing I fear, and I believe others do as well, is forgetting how to code without an AI assistant. I'm not sure if I'm wasting energy worrying about this, because I also feel like coding with an AI assistant will be the de-facto standard wherever you go in the future.

I mainly use AI assistants for tab completion, smart rewrites, multi-line edits and helping me figuring out errors, or learning new things. It is really nice to have it available to ask questions and get customized answers returned, compared to googling it and trying to find a matching thread on Stackoverflow. Sure, I've done been using multi cursor editing or vim's substitute command for some of these tasks before, but I've found Cursor doing it pretty much as fast as well. I've also asked for suggestions on how to solve tasks that are new to me (e.g. tailored examples using Web Audio API). But I've rarely used the solutions without rewriting them a bit.

Anyway, I think I'll be switching between Cursor and VSCode without AI assistant for some time. For my own sanity. But in the long run I think I'll be using Cursor as my "daily driver" and tweak it to be "just as helpful" as I want it to be.

Oh btw, I disabled Cursor for MDX files. This doesn't really have to be an MDX file though. I didn't want to disable it completely for MDX, but I wasn't able to create a cursor rule to have it help me with spelling mistakes or typos, and not predict whole sentences (that's really annoying). I specifically gave this content (among some other things) in my rules.mdc file: