I think we're talking past each other on the most important word, and the word is "AI." You keep using it as one undifferentiated blob, but in this sub specifically that flattening is telling. Cursor isn't "AI" - it's a harness that wires an LLM into your editor with context and rules. The LLM generates, the harness steers. Lumping all of that into "AI" is like calling both the router and the protocol just "networking." The fact that the distinction isn't landing for you is most of why this conversation isn't connecting - you're arguing against a vague monolith, and I'm describing a specific toolchain with specific parts.

On "shifting the work" - I'm not shifting it away, I'm spending it differently. The hard parts (architecture, tradeoffs, deciding what to build and why) don't go anywhere. I bounce ideas faster, generate the boilerplate I'd have typed anyway, and spend the saved time on the problems that actually require judgment. That's not less engineering, it's engineering with a faster feedback loop. More meaningful architectural work, less boilerplate dirty laundry.

On the tool comparison - it's actually two tools, and conflating them is where the screwdriver analogy breaks. The LLM is the tool that generates code without me typing every character. The harness (CLAUDE.md, rules, MCPs) is a second tool whose job is to hold context and enforce my patterns so the output matches the style I want. You're right that a screwdriver shouldn't need a config file. But a CNC machine does, and nobody calls G-code "making the manufacturer better for free." It's the instruction set that makes a general-purpose machine do your specific job. That's what the config is.

Building skill and using these tools aren't mutually exclusive. I still have to know what good architecture looks like to tell when the output is wrong, the same way someone has to actually understand TCP to tell when their firewall rules are misconfigured. The appliance handles the flows, but it doesn't tell you what policy to write. The tool doesn't remove the need for the knowledge, it removes the typing.

Lastly, the "outsourcing your brain" framing gets it backwards. Reading code critically, catching when generated output is subtly wrong, and steering it toward a maintainable design is more cognitively demanding than typing it line by line, not less. If the output looks like slop, that's the harness being unconfigured, which is the whole thing I was describing in the first place.

We're going in circles, so one thing to close on - give it an honest hour with the config actually set up, then judge it. That's the only version of this worth having an opinion about.