There is a bit of a tempest brewing in the developer community about cursor and AI assisted coding tools. I recently saw a post from a dev that mentioned that they were turning off copilot for their IDE finding that the suggestions were making them overly dependent on the AI model.
Reading arguments about this mini controversy – I feel like there is an obvious intermediate solution that hasn’t been stated. I’ll get to it in a minute after I lay out some of the relevant facts here.
First, I believe AI assisted coding is the future for day to day coding (if it doesn’t proceed further to supervising swarms of agents.) This is why I’ve invested time in understanding how these tools work, and why I’ve built my Geist framework for agents. Anyone who has used cursor with Sonnet 3.5 can see how fast you can positively sail through writing boilerplate and prototyping code. It can even be used to pattern match against bugs, edge cases, and be used to debug faster.
Second – I do believe that AI assisted coding can induce a type of atrophy in basic syntax, understanding and mental motions that are beneficial for software Engineering.
I think the solution to the problem is pretty obvious – use the newest tools in your craft 80% of the time – the latest AI models and integrations, debugger tools, etc. But 20% of the time – take a mental leg day. Unplug your modern tools and build without them. Boot up neovim with only the most basic extensions (no cheating with avante.vim) – and take the time to exercise some skills that might otherwise get atrophied. Not only will you keep in touch with the basics principles of programming – but you’ll appreciate your rocket powered – AI tooling even more when you get back to it.
Deep Learnings 
Leave a comment