Cucumber is tool used to make tests readable to business users. It consists of plain English sentences that are matched using regex to your Capybara steps.
Using recording tools won't do you any good in the long run. They were meant for beginners and aren't that powerful so I recommend you go straight to coding.
You can use Selenium alone for your tests, but I would recommend you continue to use Cucumber for documentation purposes, if you find them useful and easy to work with. After all, Cucumber can use Capybara or the Selenium web driver.
