there could also be an almost chaos-monkey-like approach of cutting off the assistance at indeterminate intervals, so you've got to maintain a baseline of skill / muscle memory to be able to deal with this.

I'm not sure if people would subject themselves to this, but perhaps the market will just serve it to us as it currently does with internet and services sometimes going down :-)

I know for me when this happens, and also when I sometimes do a bit of offline coding in various situations, it feels good to exercise that skill of just writing code from scratch (erm, well, with intellisense) and kind of re-assert that I can do it now we're in tab-autocomplete land most of the time.

But I guess opting into such a scheme would be one-to-one with the type of self determined discipline required to learn anything in the first place anyway, so I could see it happening for those with at least equal motivation to learn X as exist today.