Cursor IDE support hallucinates lockout policy, causes user cancellations
old.reddit.comEarlier today Cursor, the magical AI-powered IDE started kicking users off when they logged in from multiple machines.
Like,you’d be working on your desktop, switch to your laptop, and all of a sudden you're forcibly logged out. No warning, no notification, just gone.
Naturally, people thought this was a new policy.
So they asked support.
And here’s where it gets batshit: Cursor has a support email, so users emailed them to find out. The support peson told everyone this was “expected behavior” under their new login policy.
One problem. There was no support team, it was an AI designed to 'mimic human responses'
That answer, totally made up by the bot, spread like wildfire.
Users assumed it was real (because why wouldn’t they? It's their own support system lol), and within hours the community was in revolt. Dozens of users publicly canceled their subscriptions, myself included. Multi-device workflows are table stakes for devs, and if you're going to pull something that disruptive, you'd at least expect a changelog entry or smth.
Nope.
And just as people started comparing notes and figuring out that the story didn’t quite add up… the main Reddit thread got locked. Then deleted. Like, no public resolution, no real response, just silence.
To be clear: this wasn’t an actual policy change, just a backend session bug, and a hallucinated excuse from a support bot that somehow did more damage than the bug itself.
But at that point, it didn’t matter. People were already gone.
Honestly one of the most surreal product screwups I’ve seen in a while. Not because they made a mistake, but because the AI support system invented a lie, and nobody caught it until the userbase imploded.
There is a certain amount of irony that people try really hard to say that hallucinations are not a big problem anymore and then a company that would benefit from that narrative gets directly hurt by it.
Which of course they are going to try to brush it all away. Better than admitting that this problem very much still exists and isn’t going away anytime soon.
Did anyone say that? They are an issue everywhere, including for code. But with code at least I can have tooling to automatically check and feed back that it hallucinated libraries, functions etc, but with just normal research / problems there is no such thing and you will spend a lot of time verifying everything.
I think that’s why Apple is very slow at rolling out AI if it ever actually will. Downside is way too big than the upside.
You say slowly, but in my opinion Apple made an out of character misstep by releasing a terrible UX to everyone. Apple intelligence is a running joke now.
Yes they didn't push it as hard as, say, copilot. I still think they got in way too deep way too fast.
Fast!? They were two years slow and still fell face flat, and then rolled back the software
They already rolled out an "AI" product. Got humiliated pretty bad, and rolled it back. [0]
[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cq5ggew08eyo
They had an opportunity to actually adapt, to embrace getting rapid feedback/iterating: But they are not equipped for it culturally. Major lost opportunity as it could have been a driver of internal change.
I'm certain they'll get it right soon enough though. People were writing off Google in terms of AI until this year.. and oh how attitudes have changed.
They also have text thread and email summaries. I still think it counts as a slow rollout.
Investors seem to be starved for novelty right now. Web 2.0 is a given, web 3.0 is old, crypto has lost the shine, all that's left to jump on at the moment is AI.
Apple fumbled a bit with Siri, and I'm guessing they're not too keen to keep chasing everyone else, since outside of limited applications it turns out half baked at best.
Sadly, unless something shinier comes along soon, we're going to have to accept that everything everywhere else is just going to be awful. Hallucinations in your doctor's notes, legal rulings, in your coffee and laundry and everything else that hasn't yet been IoT-ified.
"all that's left to jump on at the moment is AI" -> No, it's the effective applications of AI. It's unprecedented.
I was in the VC space for a while previously, most pitch decks claimed to be using AI: But doing even the briefest of DD - it was generally BS. Now it's real.
With respect to everything being awful: One might say that's always been the case. However, now there's a chance (and requirement) to build in place safeguards/checks/evals and massively improve both speed and quality of services through AI.
Don't judge for the problems: Look at the exponential curve, think about how to solve the problems. Otherwise, you will get left behind.
Yet Apple has reenabled Apple Intelligence multiple times on my devices after OS updates despite me very deliberately and angrily disabling it multiple times
When you got 1-2billion users a day doing maybe 10 billion prompts a day, it’s risky
It's a huge problem. I just can't get past it and I get burned by it every time I try one of these products. Cursor in particular was one of the worst; the very first time I allowed it to look at my codebase, it hallucinated a missing brace (my code parsed fine), "helpfully" inserted it, and then proceeded to break everything. How am I supposed to trust and work with such a tool? To me, it seems like the equivalent of lobbing a live hand grenade into your codebase.
Don't get me wrong, I use AI every day, but it's mostly as a localized code complete or to help me debug tricky issues. Meaning I've written and understand the code myself, and the AI is there to augment my abilities. AI works great if it's used as a deductive tool.
Where it runs into issues is when it's used inductively, to create things that aren't there. When it does this, I feel the hallucinations can be off the charts -- inventing APIs, function names, entire libraries, and even entire programming languages on occasion. The AI is more than happy to deliver any kind of information you want, no matter how wrong it is.
AI is not a tool, it's a tiny Kafkaesque bureaucracy inside of your codebase. Does it work today? Yes! Why does it work? Who can say! Will it work tomorrow? Fingers crossed!
You're not supposed to trust the tool, you're supposed to review and rework the code before submitting for external review.
I use AI for rather complex tasks. It's impressive. It can make a bunch of non-trivial changes to several files, and have the code compile without warnings. But I need to iterate a few times so that the code looks like what I want.
That being said, I also lose time pretty regularly. There's a learning curve, and the tool would be much more useful if it was faster. It takes a few minutes to make changes, and there may be several iterations.
> You're not supposed to trust the tool, you're supposed to review and rework the code before submitting for external review.
It sounds like the guys in this article should not have trusted AI to go fully open loop on their customer support system. That should be well understood by all "customers" of AI. You can't trust it to do anything correctly without human feedback/review and human quality control.
1) Once you get it to output something you like, do you check all the lines it changed? Is there a threshold after which you just... hope?
2) No matter what the learning curve, you're using a statistical tool that outputs in probabilities. If that's fine for your workflow/company, go for it. It's just not what a lot of developers are okay with.
Of course it's a spectrum with the AI deniers in one corner and the vibe coders in the other. I personally won't be relying 100% on a tool and letting my own critical thinking atrophy, which seems to be happening, considering recent studies posted here.
1) Yes, I review every line it changed.
2) I find the tool analogy helpful but it has limits. Yes, it’s a stochastic tool, but in that sense it’s more like another mind, not a tool. And this mind is neither junior nor senior, but rather a savant.
> You're not supposed to trust the tool
This is just an incredible statement. I can't think of another development tool we'd say this about. I'm not saying you're wrong, or that it's wrong to have tools we can't just, just... wow... what a sea change.
Stackoverflow is like this, you read an answer but are not fully sure if its right or if it fits your needs.
Of course there is a review system for a reason, but we frequently use "untrusted" tools in development.
That one guy in a github issue that said "this worked for me"
Imagine! Imagine if 0.05% of the time gcc just injected random code into your binaries. Imagine, you swing a hammer and 1% of the time it just phases into the wall. Tools are supposed to be reliable.
In Mechanical Engineering, this is 100% a thing with fluid dynamics simulation. You need to know if the output is BS based on a number of factors that I don't understand.
Imagine if your compiler just randomly and non-deterministically compiled valid code to incorrect binaries, and the tool's developer couldn't really tell you why it happens, how often it was expected to happen, how severe the problem was expected to be, and told you to just not trust your compiler to create correct machine code.
Imagine if your calculator app randomly and non-deterministically performed arithmetic incorrectly, and you similarly couldn't get correctness expectations from the developer.
Imagine if any of your communication tools randomly and non-deterministically translated your messages into gibberish...
I think we'd all throw away such tools, but we are expected to accept it if it's an "AI tool?"
Imagine that you yourself never use these tools directly but your employees do. And the sellers of said tools swear that the tools are amazing and correct and will save you millions.
They keep telling you that any employee who highlights problems with the tools are just trying to save their job.
Your investors tell you that the toolmakers are already saving money for your competitors.
Now, do you want that second house and white lotus vacation or not?
Making good tools is difficult. Bending perception (“is reality”) is easier and enterprise sales, just like good propaganda, work. The gold rush will leave a lot of bodies behind but the shovelmakers will make a killing.
I feel like there's a lot of motivated reasoning going on, yeah.
If the only calculators that existed failed at 5% of the calculations, or if the only communication tools miscommunicated 5% of the time, we would still use both all the time. They would be far less than 95% as useful as perfect versions, but drastically better then not having the tools at all.
Absolutely not. We'd just do the calculations by hand, which is better than running the 95%-correct calculator and then doing the calculations by hand anyway to verify its output.
> I can't think of another development tool we'd say this about.
Because no other dev tool actually generates unique code like AI does. So you treat it like the other components of your team that generates code, the other developers. Do you trust other developers to write good code without mistakes without getting it reviewed by others. Of course not.
Yes, actually, I do! I trust my teammates with tens of thousands of hours of experience in programming, embedded hardware, our problem spaces, etc. to write from a fully formed worldview, and for their code to work as intended (as far as anybody can tell before it enters preliminary testing by users) by the time the rest of the team reviews it. Most code review is uneventful. Have some pride in your work and you'll be amazed at what's possible.
I trust my colleagues to write code that compiles, at the very least
Oh at the very least I trust them to not take code that compiles and immediately assess that it's broken.
But of course everyone absolutely NEEDS to use AI for codereviews! How else could the huge volume of AI-generated code be managed?
"Do you trust other developers to write good code without mistakes without getting it reviewed by others."
Literally yes. Test coverage and QA to catch bugs sure but needing everything manually reviewed by someone else sounds like working in a sweatshop full of intern-level code bootcamp graduates, or if you prefer an absolute dumpster fire of incompetence.
I would accept mistakes and inconsistency from a human, especially one not very experienced or skilled. But I expect perfection and consistency from a machine. When I command my computer to do something, I expect it to do it correctly, the same way every time, to convert a particular input to an exact particular output, every time. I don't expect it to guess, or randomly insert garbage, or behave non-deterministically. Those things are called defects(bugs) and I'd want them to be fixed.
This seems like a particularly limited view of what a machine is. Specifically expecting it to behave deterministically.
Still, the whole Unix philosophy of building tools starts with a foundation of building something small that can do one thing well. If that is your foundation, you can take advantage of composability and create larger tools that are more capable. The foundation of all computing today is built on this principle.
Building on AI seems more like building on a foundation of sand, or building in a swamp. You can probably put something together, but it's going to continually sink into the bog. Better to build on a solid foundation, so you don't have to continually stop the thing from sinking, so you can build taller.
Then you are going to hate the future.
Exactly this.
Ok, here I thought requiring PR review and approval before merging was standard industry best practice. I guess all the places I've worked have been doing it wrong?
There's a lot of shit that has become "best practice" over the last 15 years, and a lot more that was "best practice" but fell out of favor because reasons. All of it exists on a continuum of what is actually reasonable given the circumstances. Reviewing pull requests is one of those things that is reasonable af in theory, produces mediocre results in practice, and is frequently nothing more than bureaucratic overhead. Consider a case where an individual adds a new feature to an existing codebase. Given they are almost certainly the only one who has spent significant time researching the particulars of the feature set in question, and are the only individual with any experience at all with the new code, having another developer review it means you've got inexperienced, low-info eyes examining something they do not fully understand, and will have to take some amount of time to come up to speed on. Sure they'll catch obvious errors, but so would a decent test suite.
Am I arguing in favor of egalitarian commit food fights with no adults in the room? Absolutely not. But demanding literally every change go through a formal review process before getting committed, like any other coding dogma, has a tendency to generate at least as much bullshit as it catches, just a different flavor.
I'd add that the deductive abilities translate to well-defined spec. I've found it does well when I know what APIs I want it to use, and what general algorithmic approaches I want (which are still sometimes brainstormed separately with an AI, but not within the codebase). I provide it a numbered outline of the desired requirements and approach to take, and it usually does a good job.
It does poorly without heavy instruction, though, especially with anything more than toy projects.
Still a valuable tool, but far from the dreamy autonomous geniuses that they often get described as.
> the very first time I allowed it to look at my codebase, it hallucinated a missing brace (my code parsed fine), "helpfully" inserted it, and then proceeded to break everything.
This is not an inherent flaw of LLMs, rather it is a flaw of a particular implementation-if you use guided sampling, so during sampling you only consider tokens allowed by the programming language grammar at that position, it becomes impossible for the LLM to generate ungrammatical output
> When it does this, I feel the hallucinations can be off the charts -- inventing APIs, function names, entire libraries,
They can use guided sampling for this too - if you know the set of function names which exist in the codebase and its dependencies, you can reject tokens that correspond to non-existent function names during sampling
Another approach, instead of or as well as guided sampling, is to use an agent with function calling - so the LLM can try compiling the modified code itself, and then attempt to recover from any errors which occur.
Versioning in source control for even personal projects just got far more important.
It's wild how people write without version control... Maybe I'm missing something.
yeah, "git init" (if you haven't botherered to create a template repo) is not exactly cumbersome.
Thankfully modern source control doesn't reuse user-supplied filenames for its internals. In the dark ages, I destroyed more than one checkout using commands of the form:
[flagged]
> it hallucinated a missing brace (my code parsed fine), "helpfully" inserted it, and then proceeded to break everything.
Your tone is rather hyperbolic here, making it sound like an extra brace resulted in a disaster. It didn't. It was easy to detect and easy to fix. Not a big deal.
(Cursor cofounder)
Apologies - something very clearly went wrong here. We’ve already begun investigating, and some very early results:
* Any AI responses used for email support are now clearly labeled as such. We use AI-assisted responses as the first filter for email support.
* We’ve made sure this user is completely refunded - least we can do for the trouble.
Appreciate vocal feedback and eyes on this. Hate missing the mark here, and hope we can improve.
(For context, this user’s complaint was the result of a race condition that appears on very slow internet connections. The race leads to a bunch of unneeded sessions being created which crowds out the real sessions. We’ve rolled out a fix.)
Tinfoil hat me says that it was a policy change that they are blaming on an "AI Support Agent" and hoping nobody pokes too much behind the curtain.
Note that I have absolutely no knowledge or reason to believe this other than general distrust of companies.
> Tinfoil hat me says that it was a policy change that they are blaming on an "AI Support Agent" and hoping nobody pokes too much behind the curtain.
Yeah, who puts an AI in charge of support emails with no human checks and no mention that it's an AI generated reply in the response email?
AI companies high on their own supply, that's who. Ultralytics is (in)famous for it.
Why is Ultralytics yolo famous for it?
They had a bot, for a long time, that responded to every github issue in the persona of the founder and tried to solve your problem. It was bad at this, and thus a huge proportion of people who had a question about one of their yolo models received worse-than-useless advice "directly from the CEO," with no disclosure that it was actually a bot.
The bot is now called "UltralyticsAssistant" and discloses that it's automated, which is welcome. The bad advice is all still there though.
(I don't know if they're really _famous_ for this, but among friends and colleagues I have talked to multiple people who independently found and were frustrated by the useless github issues.)
A forward-thinking company that believes in the power of Innovation™.
These bros are getting high on their own supply. I vibe, I code, but I don't do VibeOps. We aren't ready.
VibeSupport bots, how well did that work out for Canada Air?
https://thehill.com/business/4476307-air-canada-must-pay-ref...
"Vibe coding" is the cringiest term I've heard in tech in... maybe ever? I'm can't believe it's something that's caught on. I'm old, I guess, but jeez.
It's douchey as hell, and representative of the ever-diminishing literacy of our population.
More evidence: all of the ignorant uses of "hallucinate" here, when what's happening is FABRICATION.
> but I don't do VibeOps.
I believe it’s pronounced VibeOops.
"It's evolving, but backwards."
An AI company dogfooding their own marketing. It's almost admirable in a way.
I worry that they don't understand the limitations of their own product.
The market will teach them. Problem solved.
This is the future AI companies are selling. I believe they would 100%.
I worry that the tally of those who do is much higher than is prudent.
A lot of company actually, although 100% automation is still rare.
100% for first line support is very common. It was common years ago before ChatGPT and ChatGPT made it so much better than before.
It does say it's AI generated. This is the signature line:
Clearer would have been: "AI controlled support assistant of Cursor".
True. And maybe they added that to the signature later anyway. But OP in the reddit thread did seem aware it was an AI agent.
OpenAI seems to do this. I've gotten complete nonsense replies from their support for billing questions.
Is this sarcasm? AI has been getting used to handle support requests for years without human checks. Why would they suddenly start adding human checks when the tech is way better than it was years ago?
AI may have been used to pick from a repertoire of stock responses, but not to generate (hallucinate) responses. Thus you may have gotten a response that fails to address your request, but not a response with false information.
Same reason they would have added checks all along. They care whether the information is correct.
But then again history shows already they _don't_ care.
[dead]
Given how incredibly stingy tech companies are about spending any money on support, I would not be surprised if the story about it being a rogue AI support agent is 100% true.
It also seems like a weird thing to lie about, since it's just another very public example of AI fucking up something royally, coming from a company whose whole business model is selling AI.
Both things can be true. The AI support bot might have been trained to respond with “yup that’s the new policy”, but the unexpected shitstorm that erupted might have caused the company to backpedal by saying “official policy? Ha ha, no of course not, that was, uh, a misbehaving bot!”
That is because AI runs PR as well.
I think this would actually make them look worse, not better.
This is the best idea I read all day. Going to implement AI for everything right now. This is a must have feature.
Yeah it makes little sense to me that so many users would experience exactly the same "hallucination" from the same model. Unless it had been made deterministic but even then subtle changes in the wording would trigger different hallucinations, not an identical one.
Weirdly, your conspiracy theory actually makes the turn of events less disconcerting.
The thing is, what the AI hallucinated (if it was an AI-hallucinating), was the kind of sleezy thing companies do do. However, the thing with sleezy license changes is they only make money if the company publicizes them. Of course, that doesn't mean a company actually thinks that far ahead (X many managers really think "attack users ... profit!"). Riddles in enigmas...
LLM anything makes me queasy. Why would any self respecting software developer use this tripe? Learn how to write good software. Become an expert in the trade. AI anything will only dig a hole for software to die in. Cheapens the product, butchers the process and absolutely decimates any hope for skill development for future junior developers.
I'll just keep chugging along, with debian, python and vim, as I always have. No LLM, no LSP, heck not even autocompletion. But damn proud of every hand crafted, easy to maintain and fully understood line of code I'll write.
I use it all the time, and it has accelerated my output massively.
Now, I don't trust the output - I review everything, and it often goes wrong. You have to know how to use it. But I would never go back. Often it comes up with more elegant solutions than I would have. And when you're working with a new platform, or some unfamiliar library that it already knows, it's an absolute godsend.
I'm also damn proud of my own hand-crafted code, but to avoid LLMs out of principal? That's just luddite.
20+ years of experience across game dev, mobile and web apps, in case you feel it relevant.
I have a hard time being sold on “yea it’s wrong a lot, also you have to spend more time than you already do on code review.”
Getting to sit down and write the code is the most enjoyable part of the job, why would I deprive myself of that? By the time the problem has been defined well enough to explain it to an LLM sitting down and writing the code is typically very simple.
You're giving the game away when you talk about the joy LLMs are robbing from you. I think we all intuit why people don't like the idea of big parts of their jobs being automated away! But that's not an argument on the merits. Our entire field is premised on automating people's jobs away, so it's always a little rich to hear programmers kvetching about it being done to them.
I naively bought into the idea of a future where the computers do the stuff we’re bad at and we get to focus on the cool human stuff we enjoy. If these LLMs were truly incredible at doing my job I’d pack it up and find something else to do, but for now I’m wholly unimpressed, despite what management seems to see in it.
Well, I've spent my entire career writing software, starting in C in the 1990s, and what I'm seeing on my dev laptop is basically science fiction as far as I'm concerned.
Hey both things can be true. It’s a long ways from the AI renaissances of the past. There’s areas LLMs make a lot of sense. I just don’t find them to be great pair programming partners yet.
I think people are kind of kidding themselves here. For Go and Python, two extraordinarily common languages in production software, it would be weird for me at this point not to start with LLM output. Actually building an entire application, soup-to-nuts, vibe-code style? No, I wouldn't do that. But having the LLM writing as much as 80% of the code, under close supervision, with a careful series of prompts (like, "ok now add otel spans to all the functions that take unpredictable amounts of time")? Sure.
Don't get me started on testcase generation.
I'm glad that works for you. Ultimately I think different people will prefer different ways of working. Often when I'm starting a new project I have lots of boilerplate from previous ones I can bootstrap off of. If it's a new tool I'm unfamiliar with I prefer to stumble through it, otherwise I never fully get my head around it. This tends to not look like insane levels of productivity, but I've always found in the long run time spent scratching my head or writing awkward code over and over again (Rust did this to me a lot in the early days) ends up paying off huge dividends in the long run, especially when it's code I'm on the hook for.
What I've found frustrating about the narrative around these tools; I've watched them from afar with intrigue but ultimately found that method of working just isn't for me. Over the years I've trialed more tools than I can remember and adopted the ones I found useful, while casting aside ones that aren't a great fit. Sometimes I find myself wandering back to them once they're fully baked. Maybe that will be the case here, but is it not valid to say "eh...this isn't it for me"? Am I kidding myself?
The parts worth thinking about you still think about. The parts that you’ve done a million times before you delegate so you can spend better and greater effort on the parts worth thinking about.
This is where the disconnect is for me; mundane code can sometimes be nefarious, and I find the mental space I'm in when writing it is very different than reviewing, especially if my mind is elsewhere. The best analogy I can use is a self-driving car, where there's a chance at any point it could make an unpredictable and potentially fatal move. You as the driver cannot trust it but are not actively engaged in the act of driving and have a much higher likelihood of being complacent.
Code review is difficult to get right, especially if the goal is judging correctness. Maybe this is a personal failing, but I find being actively engaged to be a critical part of the process; the more time I spend with the code I'm maintaining (and usually on call for!) the better understanding I have. Tedium can sometimes be a great signal for an abstraction!
For me it's typically wrong not in a fundamental way but a trivial way like bad import paths or function calls, like if I forgot to give it relevant context.
And yet the time it takes me to use the LLM and correct its output is usually faster than not using it at all.
Over time I've developed a good sense for what tasks it succeeds at (or is only trivially wrong) and what tasks it's just not up for.
I was with you 150% (though Arch, Golang and Zed) until a friend convinced me to give it a proper go and explained more about how to talk to the LLM.
I've had a long-term code project that I've really struggled with, for various reasons. Instead of using my normal approach, which would be to lay out what I think the code should do, and how it should work, I just explained the problem and let the LLM worry about the code.
It got really far. I'm still impressed. Claude worked great, but ran out of free tokens or whatever, and refused to continue (fine, it was the freebie version and you get what you pay for). I picked it up again in Cursor and it got further. One of my conditions for this experiment was to never look at the code, just the output, and only talk to the LLM about what I wanted, not about how I wanted it done. This seemed to work better.
I'm hitting different problems, now, for sure. Getting it to test everything was tricky, and I'm still not convinced it's not just fixing the test instead of the code every time there's a test failure. Peeking at the code, there are several remnants of previous architectural models littering the codebase. Whole directories of unused, uncalled, code that got left behind. I would not ship this as it is.
But... it works, kinda. It's fast, I got a working demo of something 80% near what I wanted in 1/10 of the time it would have taken me to make that manually. And just focusing on the result meant that I didn't go down all the rabbit holes of how to structure the code or which paradigm to use.
I'm hooked now. I want to get better at using this tool, and see the failures as my failures in prompting rather than the LLM's failure to do what I want.
I still don't know how much work would be involved in turning the code into something I could actually ship. Maybe there's a second phase which looks more like conventional development cleaning it all up. I don't know yet. I'll keep experimenting :)
> Why would any self respecting software developer use this tripe?
Because I can ship 2x to 5x more code with nearly the same quality.
My employer isn't paying me to be a craftsman. They're paying me to ship things that make them money.
How do you define code quality in this case and what is your stack?
Good employee, you get cookie and 1h extra pto
No, I get to spend 2 hours working with LLMs, and then spend the rest of the day doing whatever I please. Repeat.
I’m pretty much in the same boat as you, but here’s one place that LLMs helped me:
In python I was scanning 1000’s of files each for thousands of keywords. A naive implementation took around 10 seconds, obviously the largest share of execution time after running instrumentation. A quick ChatGPT led me to Aho-Corasick and String searching algorithms, which I had never used before. Plug in a library and bam, 30x speed up for that part of the code.
I could have asked my knowledgeable friends and coworkers, but not at 11PM on a Saturday.
I could have searched the web and probably found it out.
But the LLM basically auto completed the web, which I appreciate.
Yes! This is how AI should be used. You have a question that’s quite difficult and may not score well on traditional keyword matching. An LLM can use pattern matching to point you in the right direction of well written library based on CS research and/or best practices.
I mean, even in the absence of knowledge of the existence of text searching algorithms (where I'm from we learn that in university) just a simple web search would have gotten you there as well no? Maybe would have taken a few minutes longer though.
> I could have asked my knowledgeable friends and coworkers, but not at 11PM on a Saturday.
Get friends with weirder daily schedules. :-)
I think it's best if we all keep the hours from ~10pm to the morning sacred. Even if we are all up coding, the _reason_ I'm up coding at that hour is because no one is pinging me
> Why would any self respecting software developer use this tripe?
The ones with self-respect aren't the ones using it
That’s a pretty mean spirited way to approach this subject.
I think the creators of Redis and Django are very capable and self-respecting software developers.
Is it just me or has there been a wave of delusional people on Hacker News completely neglecting new advancements in technology? The two most common technologies I see having this type of discourse are AI coding and containers.
Either everyone here is a low level quantum database 5D graphics pipeline developer with a language from the future that AI hasn't yet learned, or some people are in denial.
I'm primarily an embedded firmware developer. Gas/electric power products. Ada codebase, so it's off the beaten path but nothing academic by any stretch of the imagination. I have a comprehensive reference manual that describes exactly how the language should be working, and don't need an LLM to regurgitate it to me. I have comprehensive hardware and programming manuals for the MCUs I program that describe exactly how the hardware should be working, and don't need and LLM to regurgitate it to me. I actually really specifically don't want the information transformed, it is engineered to be the way it is, and to change its presentation strips it of a lot of its power.
I deal with way too much torque and way too much electrical energy to trust an LLM. Saving a few minutes here and there isn't worth blowing up expensive prototypes or getting hurt over.
Software development is a spectrum and you're basically on the polar opposite end of the one AI is being used for: sloppy web dev.
It’s totally valid to see a new piece of tech, try it, say it’s not for you, and move on. With LLMs it feels forced-fed, and simply saying “eh I’m good, no thanks” isn’t enough. Lots of hype and headlines on how it’s going to take our jobs and replace us, pressure from management to adopt it.
Some new trends make perfect sense to me and I’ll adopt them. I’ve let some pass me by and rarely regretted it. That doesn’t make me a luddite.
I think it’s just backlash against all the AI hype - I get it, im tired of hearing about it too, but - it’s already here to stay, it’s been that way for years now - it’s a normal part of development now for most people, the same as any new tool that becomes the industry darling. Learn to like it or at least learn it, but the reality is here whether you like it or not.
The gatekeepers are witnessing the gate opening up more and letting more people in and they don't like that at all.
I understand not wanting to use LLMs that with no correctness guarantees that randomly hallucinate, but what's wrong with ordinary LSPs and autocompletion? Those seem like perfectly useful tools.
I had a professor who used `ed` to write his code. He said only bring able to see one line at a time forces you to think more about what you're doing.
Anyways, Cursor generates all my code now.
Good for you - if that’s what works for you, then keep on keeping on.
Don’t get too hung up on what works for other people. That’s not a good look.
> with debian, python and vim
Why are you cheapening the product, butchering the process and decimating any hope for further skill development by using these tools?
Instead of python, you should be using assembly or heck, just binary. Instead of relying on an OS abstraction layer made by someone else, you should write everything from scratch on the bare metal. Don't lower yourself by using a text editor, go hex. Then your code will truly be "hand crafted". You'll have even more reason to be proud.
This comment presupposes that AI is only used to write code that the (presumably junior-level) author doesn’t understand.
I’m a self-respecting software developer with 28 years of experience. I would, with some caveats, venture to say I am an expert in the trade.
AI helps me write good code somewhere between 3x and 10x faster.
This whole-cloth shallow dismissal of everything AI as worthless overhyped slop is just as tired and content-free as breathless claims of the limitless power or universal applicability of AI.
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Job market for knowledge jobs isn’t even that good anymore and plenty of people expect it to get worse regardless of their stance on AI. What makes you so sure that LLM users have a bank to laugh all the way to? Already there are many like you, the money you’d make is peanuts
Are you going to the bank to take out a loan? You're claiming you've outcompeted other programmers by using... optimizing compilers?
here's an archive of the original reddit post since it seemed to be instantly nuked: https://undelete.pullpush.io/r/cursor/comments/1jyy5am/psa_c...
It's funny seeing all of the comments trying to blame the users for this screwup by claiming they're using it wrong. It is reddit though, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised.
what is it about reddit that causes this behavior, when they otherwise are skeptical only of whatever the "official story" is at all costs? it is fascinating behavior.
One reason is lazy one liners are allowed and have high cost/benefit for shitposters and attract many upvotes, so this gets voted highly setting the tone for flamewars in the thread.
It’s miles better on HN. Most bad responses are penalized. The culture is upvoting things that are contributing. I frequently upvote responses that disagree with me. Oftentimes I learn something from it.
think about the demographic that would join a cursor subreddit. Basically 90% superfans. Go against the majority opinion and you'll be nuked
>Go against the majority opinion and you'll be nuked
This is true for the entirety of Reddit, and the majority is deranged.
I think it's a combination of oppositional defiant disorder and insufficient moderation.
wow they nuked it for damage control and only caused more damage
I just cancelled - not because I thought the policy change was real - but simply because this article reminded me I hadn't used it much this month.
so the old adage no such thing as bad PR shows to be incorrect. had they not been in the news, they'd at least have gotten one more monthly sub from you!
This would only be complete in aggregate. We don’t know how many people signed up as a result.
This is where Kagi’s subscription policy comes in handy. If you don’t use it for a month, you don’t pay for it that month. There is no need to cancel it and Kagi doesn’t have to pay user acquisition costs.
Slack does this as well. It's a genius idea from a business perspective. Normally IT admins have to go around asking users if they need the service (or more likely you have to request a license for yourself), regularly monitor usage, deactivate stale users etc., all to make sure the company isn't wasting money. Slack comes along and says - don't worry, just onboard every user at the company. If they don't log in and send at least N messages we won't bill them for that month.
They mention an user taking an action will be billed. I guess even sending a message or reacting with an emoji would count as taking an action ? Even logging in ?
That's a fun one. It could be interpreted as a generous implementation of a monthly subscription, or a hostile implementation of a metered plan.
Wow, I wish more services did that.
Kagi should take it a step further and just charge per search
surely the first thing you do when you subscribe to Kagi is set your default browser search to Kagi.
Really? Brilliant idea.
Cursor is weird. They have a basically unused GitHub with a thousand unanswered Issues. It's so buggy in ways that VSCode isn't. I hate it. Also I use it everyday and pay for it.
That's when you know you've captured something, when people hate use your product.
Any real alternatives? I've tried continue and was unimpressed with the tab completion and typing experience (felt like laggy typing on a remote server).
VS Code with standard copilot for tab completion and Aider in a terminal window for all the heavier lifts, asking questions, architecting etc. And it’s cheap! I’ve been using it with OpenRouter (lets you easily switch models and providers) and my $10 of credits lasted weeks. Granted, I also use Claude a lot in the browser.
The reason many prefer Cursor over VSCode + GitHub Copilot is because of how much faster Cursor is for tab completion. They use some smaller models that are latency optimized specifically to make the tab completion feel as fast as possible.
Copilot's tab completion is significantly worse than cursor's in my experience (only tried free copilot)
Paid Copilot is pretty crap too to be honest. I don’t know why it’s so bad.
If you don't mind leaving VSCode I'm a huge fan of Zed. Doesn't support some languages / stacks yet but their AI features are on-par with VSCode
Agreed. My laptop has never used swap until I started using cursor… it’s a resource hog, I dislike using it, but it’s still the best AI coding aid and for the work I’m doing right now, the speed boost is more valuable than hand crafted code in enough cases that it’s worth it for me. But I don’t enjoy using the IDE itself, and I used vscode for a few years.
Personally, I will jump ship to Zed as soon as it’s agent mode is good enough (I used Zed as a dumb editor for about a year before I used cursor, and I love it)
I find that if you turn off telemetry (i.e. turn on privacy) the resource hogging slows down a lot
I switched to Windsurf.ai when cursor broke for me. Seems about the same but less buggy. Haven't used it in the last couple weeks, though, so YMMV.
I found the Windsurf agent to be relatively less capable, but their inline tool (and the “Tab” they’re promoting so much) has been extremely underwhelming, compared to Cursor.
The only one in this class to be even worse in my experience is Github Copilot.
Cline is pretty solid and doesn't require you to use a completely unsustainable VSCode fork.
I have heard Roo Code is a fork of Cline that is better. I have never used either so far.
https://github.com/RooVetGit/Roo-Code
I prefer Roo, but they're largely the same right now. They each have some features the other doesn't.
cant bother fixing their issues because they are too busy vibe coding new features
Cursor + Vim plugin never worked for me, so I switched back to Nvim and never looked back. Nvim already has: avante, codeCompanion, copilot, and many other tools + MCP + aider if you're into that.
"Any real alternatives?"
I use Zed with `3.7 sonnet`.
And the agent beta is looking pretty good, so far, too.
Any competing product has to absolutely nail tab autocomplete like Cursor has. It's super fast, very smart (even guessing across modules) and very often correct.
Last I heard their team was still 10 people. Best size for doing something revolutionary. Way too few people to triage all that many issues and provide support.
They have enough revenue to hire, they probably are just overwhelmed. They'll figure it out soon I bet.
I have never rolled my eyes harder.
Cursor sucks. Not as a product. As a team. Their customer support is terrible.
I was offered in writing a refund by the team who cold reached out to me to ask me why I cancelled my sub one week after start. Then they ignored my 3+ emails in response asking them to refund, and other means of trying to communicate with them. Offering me a refund as a bait to gain me back, then when I accept it they ghost me. Wow. Very low.
The product is not terrible but the team responses are. And this, if you see how they handled it, is also a very poor response. First thing you notice if you open the link is that the Cursor team removed the reddit post! As if we were not going to see it or something? Who do they think they are? Censoring bad comments which are 100% legit.
I am giving it a go to competitors just out of sheer frustration with how they handle customers, and I do recommend everybody to explore other products before you settle on Cursor. I don't intend to ever re-subscribe and have recommended friends to do the same, most of which agree with my experience.
What is the evidence that "dozens of users publicly canceled their subscriptions"?
A total of 4 users claimed that they did or would cancel their subscriptions in the comments, and 3/4 of them hedged by saying that they would cancel if this problem were real or happened to them. It looks like only 1 person claimed to have cancelled already.
Is there some other discussion you're looking at?
Yeah, it's a reddit thread with 59 comments.
Yet if you went by the HN comments, you'd think it were the biggest item on primetime news.
People are really champing at the bit.
Submitted title was "Cursor IDE support hallucinates lockout policy causes mass user cancellations" - I've de-massed it now.
Since the HN title rule is "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait" and the OP title is arguably misleading, I kept the submitter's title. But if there's a more accurate or neutral way to say what happened, we can change it again.
Cursor is trapped in a cat and mouse game against "hacks" where users create new accounts and get unlimited use. The repo was even trending on Github (https://github.com/yeongpin/cursor-free-vip).
Sadly, Cursor will always be hampered by maintaining it's own VSCode fork. Others in this niche are expanding rapidly and I, myself, have started transitioning to using Roo and Cline.
> Cursor is trapped in a cat and mouse game against "hacks" where users create new accounts and get unlimited use
Actually, you don't even have to make a new account. You can delete your account and make it again reusing the same email.
I did this on accident once because I left the service and decided to come back, and was surprised to get a free tier again. I sent them an email letting them know that was a bug, but they never responded.
I paid for a month of access just to be cautious, even though I wasn't using it much. I don't understand why they don't fix this.
> I don't understand why they don't fix this.
It makes number go up and to the right
literally any service with a free trial--i.e. literally any service--has this "problem". it's an integral part of the equation in setting up free trials in the first place, and by no means a "trap". you're always going to have a % of users who do this, the business model relies on the users who forget and let the subscription cross over to the next month or simply feel its worth paying
They can just drop any free usage right?
Tradeoff with slowing down user acquisition
Yes and no.
In a corporate environment, compliance needs are far more important than some trivial cost.
Embrace, extend, extinguish.
There will be a fork-a-month for these products until they have the same lockin as a textbox that you talk at, "make million dollar viral facebook marketplace post"
Yup, hallucinations are still a big problem for LLMs.
Nope, there's no reliable solution for them, as of yet.
There's hope that hallucinations will be solved by someone, somehow, soon... but hope is not a strategy.
There's also hype about non-stop progress in AI. Hype is more a strategy... but it can only work for so long.
If no solution materializes soon, many early-adopter LLM projects/trials will be cancelled. Sigh.
trying to "fix hallucinations" is like trying to fix humans being wrong. it's never going to happen. we can maybe iterate towards an asymptote, but we're never going to "fix hallucinations"
No: an LLM that doesn't confabulate will certainly get things wrong in some of the same ways that honest humans do - being misinformed, confusing similar things, "brain" damage from bad programming or hardware errors. But LLM confabulations like the one we're discussing only occur in humans when they're being sociopathically dishonest. A lawyer who makes up a court case is not a "human being wrong," it's a human lying, intentionally trying to deceive. When an LLM does it, it's because it is not capable of understanding that court cases are real events that actually happened.
Cursor's AI agent simply autocompleted a bunch of words that looked like a standard TOU agreement, presumably based on the thousands of such agreements in its training data. It is not actually capable of recognizing that it made a mistake, though I'm sure if you pointed it out directly it would say "you're right, I made a mistake." If a human did this, making up TOU explanations without bothering to check the actual agreement, the explanation would be that they were unbelievably cynical and lazy.
It is very depressing that ChatGPT has been out for nearly three years and we're still having this discussion.
From the top Reddit post:
> Apologies about the confusion here.
If this was a sincere apology, they'd stop trying to make a chat bot do support.
I have an uneasy feeling logging into a Text Editor vscode and seeing a Microsoft correlated account, work or personal, in the lower left corner. I understand that settings sync or whatever but it’d be preferred to keep to a simple config json or xml (pretty sure most settings are in json).
I have no problem, however, pasting an encryption public key into my Sublime Text editor. I’m not completely turned off by ability fir telemetry, tracking, or analytics. But having a login for a Text Editor is totally unappealing to me with all the overhead.
It’s a bummer that similar to browsers and chrome, the text editor with an active package marketplace necessitates some tech major underwriting the development with “open source” code but a closed kernel.
Long live Sublime text (i’m aware there are more pure text editors but do use mice)
As far as I can tell, the account is just for:
- github integration (e.g. git auth, sync text editor settings in private gist)
- a trusted third party server for negotiating p2p sessions with someone else (for pair programming, debugging over a call, etc...)
But anyone who wants to remove the microsoft/github account features from their editor entirely can just use vscodium instead.
I don't understand the negativity. I use Cursor and love it.
Are there real challenges with forking VS Code? Yep. Are there glitches with LLMs? Sure. Are there other AI-powered coding alternatives that can do some of the same things? You betcha.
But net-net, Cursor's an amazing power tool that strongly extends what we can accomplish in any hour, day, or week.
I've had a very good experience with Cursor on small Typescript projects.
It started hallucinating a lot as my typescript project got bigger.
I found it pretty useless in languages like Go and C++.
I ended up canceling Cursor this month. It was messing up working code, suggesting random changes, and ultimately increasing my cognitive load instead of reducing it.
god I hate redditors. what is it about that website that makes every user so so incredibly desperate to jump on literally any bandwagon they can lay their woolly arses on?
Wow. This one will go down in the history books as an example of AI hype outpacing AI capability.
Wow. This one will go down in the history books as yet another example of AI hype outpacing AI capability.
FTFY
Also see every single genAI PR release showing obvious uncanny valley image (hands with more than expected number of fingers). See Apple's propaganda videos vs actual abilities. There are plenty of other (all???) PR examples where the product does not do what is advertised on the tin.
Remember: They think you should trust their AI's output with your codebase.
LLMs for customer support is for ghetto companies that want to cheap out on quality. That's why you'll see Comcast and such use it, for example, but not your broker or anywhere where the stakes on the company's reputation are non-zero.
The coverup is worse than the crime. Truly, man has made machine in his image.
Literally the only safe way to use an LLM in a business context is as an input to a trusted human expert, and the jury is still out for even that case.
Letting an AI pose as customer support is just begging for trouble, and Cursor had their wish appropriately granted.
cursor got there first, but it’s just not that good. stuff not built on top of vscode feels much more promising. i’ve been enjoying zed.
Incidentally, this is a great way to find out you're never going to get real support when you need it, just AI responses designed to make you get tired of trying to talk to a real person they need to pay.
This drama is a very good thing because 1) now companies might reconsider replacing customer support with AI and 2) the initial victim was an AI company.
It could be better though.. I wish this happened to a company providing "AI support solutions"..
It's an AI company that is presumably drowning in money. What humans do work there have probably already had a good laugh and forgotten about this incident.
A company of 10 devs might not actually have a customer support at all. We all know, devs are not the greatest customer support people.
Local only bots or bust. Stop relying on SaaS! Cloud is synonym for just somebody else's system!
Are you using a locally ran LLM that is equally capable as Claude 4.7? Kind of seems like the answer has to be "not as capable and also the hardware investment was insane"
AI bubble popping yet? Looking forward to not buying GPUs that cost $2K (before tariffs…).
AI's killer app is "marketing". Bots are incredibly useful for selling items, services, and politics, and AI makes the bots indistinguishable from real people to most people most of the time. It's highly effective so I don't see that market shrinking any time soon.
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There’s a bubble, in the sense of the dot-com bubble. There’s a lot of money being thrown at the AI equivalents of Pets.com, and that will pop eventually. But the internet persisted and transformed every aspect of the society even after the bubble. I think AI will be similar.
AI has historically gone through bubbles, AI Winter is a term exactly because of these cycles of hype.
Maybe this time is different. Maybe not.
Who knows, the topic might be an omen.
1) there is no AI bubble, it has revolutionized how we communicate and learn 2) you don't need to buy an expensive GPU for local LLM, any contemporary laptop with enough RAM is sufficient to run an uncensored Gemma-3 fast
Railroads revolutionized transport and yet railway mania was undeniably a bubble. Something can be both very useful and yet also overvalued and overhyped leading to significant malinvestment (sometimes, everyone wins to the detriment of the investors, sometimes just everyone loses out because a huge amount of effort was spent on not useful stuff, usually somewhere in between).
I'm an AI fan, but there's clearly a desperate attempt by just about every tech company to integrate AI at the cost of genuinely productive developments in the space, in a manner that one might describe as a "bubble." Microsoft's gotta buy enough GPUs to handle Copilot in Windows Notepad, after all...
Calling it desperate is a subjective assessment. Yes, some strategies are more haphazard than others, but ignoring generative AI currently is the same as ignoring the internet in 1999 or mobile in 2010 (which facebook famously regretted and paid $4+1B to buy instagram and whatsapp in order to catch up)
I'm shocked by this perspective, and I'm deep into the LLM game (shipped 7 figure products using LLMs). I don't feel like anything has been revolutionized around communication - I can spot AI generated emails pretty easily (just send the prompt, people). On the learning front I do find LLMs to be more capable search engines for many tasks, so they're helpful absolutely.
Cursor is so good that snafu like this remarkably and tragically tolerable.
It’s the small things like this that made me switch to windsurf.
This comes on the heels of researchers putting javascript backdoors in AI assisted programs made in cursor using poisoned includes as well.
hallucinate ≠ fabricate
Fingers crossed the users will go left are all the noisy ones. I still enjoy using Cursor but their forum is filled with too many posts about $20 being too expensive or they need to raise caps or Cursor is the worse tool in the world.
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Yes, I’m complaining about complainers. It’s the circle of life on Hacker News, someone always has to play the food chain’s top predator: the mildly annoyed power user.
1. Whenever AI is used closed loop, with human feedback and a human checking the output for quality/hallucinations and then passing it along, it's often fine.
2. Whenever it is used totally on its own, with no humans in the loop, it's awful and shit like this happens.
Yet, every AI company seems to want to pretend we're ready for #2, they market their products as #2, they convince their C-suite customers that their companies should buy #2, and it's total bullshit--we're so far from that. AI tools can barely augment a human in the driver's seat. It's not even close to being ready to operate on its own.
I do a few AI projects and my number one rule is to use LLMs only to process requests and never to generate responses.
ARTIFICIAL intelligence
Good. I hope other companies stupid enough to subject their users to unleashed AI for support instead of real humans reap the consequences of their actions. I'll be eating popcorn and mocking them from my little corner of the internet.
What's the best llm-first/ designed with llm in mind editor? Is it still cursor?
There's windsurf, cline, zed, copilot got a huge update too, is cursor still leading the space?
Oooh I wanted to try this for a while so here goes…
This doesn’t seem like anything new. Ill-informed support staff has always existed, and could also give bad information to users. AI is not the problem. And it hasn’t created any problems that weren’t already there before AI.
Usually by the time I get to a post on HN criticizing AI, someone has already posted this exact type of rebuttal to any criticism…
Live by the AI slop, die by the (support) AI slop?
The original bug that prevented login was no doubt generated by AI. They probably ran it through an AI code review tool like the one posted here recently.
The world is drowning in bullshit and delusion. Programming was one of the few remaining places where you had to be precise, where it was harder to fool yourself. Where you had to understand it to program it. That's being taken away and it looks like a lot of people are embracing what is coming. It's hardly surprising - we just love our delusions too much.
Or, alternatively, it was a bug written by a human. Humans do a good enough job making bugs, no?
I’d love to visit the alternate universe you inhabit where there are no bugs in human written code.
at no point did they say anything that even comes close to saying “no bugs in human written code.”
if you’re willing to come down off your defensive AI position, because your response is a common one from people who are bought into the tech, i’ll try explain what they were saying (if not, stop reading now, save yourself some time).
maybe you’ll learn something, who knows :shrug:
> Programming was one of the few remaining places where you had to be precise, where it was harder to fool yourself. Where you had to understand it to program it.
they are talking about the approach, motivations and attitudes involved in “the craft”.
we strive for perfection, knowing we will never reach it. we, as programmers/hackers/engineers must see past our own bullshit/delusions to find our way to the fabled “solution”.
they are lamenting how those attitudes have shifted towards “fuck it, that’ll do, who cares if the code reads good, LLM made it work”.
where in the “vibe coding” feedback loop is there a place for me, a human being, to realise i have completely misunderstood a concept for the last five years and suddenly realise “oh shit, THATS HOW THAT WORKS!? HOW HAVE I NOT REALISED THAT FOR FIVE YEARS.” ?
where in “just ask chatgpt for a summary about a topic” is my journey where i learn about a documentation rendering library that i never even knew existed until i actually started reading the docs site for a library?
maybe we were thinking about transferring our docs off confluence onto a public site to document our API? asking chatGpt removes that opportunity for accidental learning and growth.
in essence, they’re lamenting the sacrifice people seem to be willing to make for convenience, at the price of continually growing and learning as a human being.
at least that’s my take on it. probably wrong — but if i am at least i get to learn something new and grow as a person and see past my own bullshit and delusions!
This is "AGI's finest".
It's what we all wanted. Replacing your human support team to be run exclusively by AI LLM bots whilst they hallucinate to their users. All unchecked.
Now this bug has now turned into a multi-million dollar mistake and costed Cursor to lose millions of dollars overnight.
What if this was a critical control system in a hospital or energy company and their AI support team (with zero humans) hallucinated a wrong meter reading and overcharged their customers? Or the AI support team hallucinated the wrong medication to a patient?
Is this the AGI future we all want?
Are we sure that the damage is in “millions”? Could it not be just the same old “vocal and loud minority”, who will wake up tomorrow and re-activate their subscription before the lunch break once Cursor team comes and writes a heartfelt apology post (well generated by AI with a system prompt of “you are a world class PR campaign manager …”)?
You're right, but this is more general - it has nothing to do with AGI and everything to do with poor management. It reminds me very much of the Chernobyl disaster, and the myriad examples in Taleb's "The Black Swan".
Where are you seeing AGI?
It's a Reddit post with 65 upvotes. Where are people getting millions of dollars overnight? HN is too dramatic lol
Even if they generously compensate locked out users, they'll probably end up ahead using the AI bot.
> Dozens of users publicly canceled their subscriptions, myself included.
Makes you think of that one meme.
I haven't seen people comment on just the wow factor here. Apparently Cursor produced a full integrated AI app and it orchestrated a self-destruct process in fashion emulating the way some human-managed companies have recently self-destructed. AI fails are easy and some require a lot of work, apparently.
Looking forward to apps trained on these Reddit threads.
Who will be the first AI-first company to close the loop with autonomous coding bots, and create self-fulfilling prophecies where a customer support bot hallucinates a policy like OP, it gets stored in the Q&A/documentation retrieval database, and the autonomous bots implement and roll out the policy and lock out all the users (and maybe the original human developers as well)?
What?
This is extremely funny. AI can't have accountability. Good luck with that.
Use AI to augment but don't really replace it as a 100% system if you can't predict and own up the failure rate.
My advice would be to use more configurable tools with less interest on selling fake perfection. Aider works.
But look, AI did take a job today. The job of cursor product developers is gone now. ;) But seriously, every time I hear media telling me AI is going to replace us, they conveniently forget episodes like this. AI may take the jobs one day, but it doesn't seem like that day is any time soon when AI adopters keep getting burned.
From cursor developer: "Hey! We have no such policy. You're of course free to use Cursor on multiple machines.
Unfortunately, this is an incorrect response from a front-line AI support bot. We did roll out a change to improve the security of sessions, and we're investigating to see if it caused any problems with session invalidation. We also do provide a UI for seeing active sessions at cursor.com/settings.
Apologies about the confusion here."
lol this is totally the kind of company you should be giving money too
and the best thing about it is that the base model is going to be trained on reddit posts so expect SupportBot3000 to be even more confident about this fact in the future!
I mean to be fair, I like that they're putting their money where their mouth is so to speak - if you want to sell a product based on the idea that AI can handle complex tasks, you should probably have AI doing what should be simple, frontline support.
> you should probably have AI doing what should be simple, frontline support.
AI companies are going to prove (to the market or to the actual people using their products) that a bunch of "simple" problems aren't at all simple and have been undervalue for a long time.
Such as support.
I don't agree with that at all. Hallucination is a very well known issue. Sure leverage AI to improve their productivity.. but not even having a human look over the responses shows they don't care about their customers
The number of times real human powered support caused me massive headache and sometimes financial damage and the number of times my lawyer fixed those because me trying to explain why they were wrong… I am not surprised that AI will do the same as the creation is the image of the creator and all that.
If you had a human support person feeding the support question into the AI to get a hint, do you think that support person is going to know that the AI response is made up and not actually a correct answer? If they knew the correct answer, they wouldn't have needed to ask the AI.
> if you want to sell a product based on the idea that AI can handle complex tasks, you should probably have AI doing what should be simple, frontline support.
That would only be true if you were correct that your AI can handle complex tasks. If you want to sell dowsing rods, you probably don't want to structure your own company to rely on the rods.
When you vibe-code customer service
Cursor: a VS Code extension that got itself valued at $10bn.
It’s basically a vscode fork that illegally uses official extensions, that were not allowed to be used in forks.
Does "it" use the official extensions, or does it only allow "you" the user to use them?
First of all, their docs link to the market place of ms:
https://www.cursor.com/how-to-install-extension
Which is basically an article to use an extension in a way that’s basically forbidden use.
If that was not bad enough the editor also told you to install certain extensions if certain file extensions were used that were also against the tos of the extension.
And basically cursor can just be using the vsix marketplace from eclipse, which does not contain restricted extensions.
What they do is at least shady.
And yes I’m not a fan of the fact that Microsoft does this, even worse they closed the source (or some parts of it) of some extensions as well, which is also a bad move (but their right)
I don't see a problem with this. If it's an extension on my machine, why do I care about the TOS?
The extensions themselves have licenses that prohibit their use with anything other than VSCode.
(You should keep this in mind next time someone tells you that VSCode is "open source", by the way. The core IDE is, sure, but if you need to do e.g. Python or C++, the official Microsoft extensions involved all have these kinds of clauses in them.)
I don't use VSCode (or Cursor in this case (which I do think was malicious in the way it blindly hallucinated a policy for a paying customer)); I use vim or notepad++ depending on my mood.
I just don't have a problem with people "violating" Terms of Service or End User License Agreements and am not really convinced there's a legal argument there either.
I personally don't have a problem with that either, but as far as legalities go, EULAs are legally binding in US.
Have EULAs been tested in court?
For distribution licenses, I would assume they have. Can't put GPL software in your closed source code, can't just download Photoshop and copy it and give it out, etc. And that makes sense and you have some reasonable path to damage/penalties (GPL → your software is now open source, Photoshop → fines or whatever)
But if you download some free piece of software and use it with some other piece of free piece software even though they say "please don't" in the EULA, what could the criminal or civil penalties possibly be?
The 1 million users + $200 million in revenue probably had something to do with the valuation.
Slack was a similar thing. IPO'd at 10 million users with 400M in revenue but got destroyed by Microsoft thanks to Teams.
Cursor is at a worse position and at greater risk of ending up like Slack very quickly and Microsoft will do the exact same thing they did to Slack.
This time by extinguishing (EEE) them by racing prices of VSCode + Copilot close to zero, until it is free.
The best thing Cursor should do is for OpenAI to buy them at a $10B valuation.
Wait, what?! Slack got destroyed by Teams? You seem to be living a few parallel universes away from the one I'm in.
Yes, "destroyed" is apt. See the graph under "Slack vs Microsoft Teams: Users" here: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/slack-statistics/
Interesting, but isn't it just because Teams is bundled and integrated with MS Office? I couldn't find any specific stats on revenue or how many businesses actually choose to pay for Teams specifically.
It's sad but true that many orgs went from Slack to Teams due to Microsoft's monopolistic sales tactics. Sucks because now I use Teams every day.
Teams has 8 times the monthly active users.
A few hallucinations. It's right more times than it's wrong. Humans make mistakes as well. Cosmic justice.
Yes, but humans can be held accountable.
How is this not an example of humans being held accountable? What would be the difference here if a help center article contained incorrect information? Would you go after the technical writer instead of the founders or Cursor employees responding on Reddit?
As annoying as it is when the human support tech is wrong about something, I'm not hoping they'll lose their job as a result. I want them to have better training/docs so it doesn't happen again in the future, just like I'm sure they'll do with this AI bot.
That only works well if someone is in an appropriate job though. Keeping someone in a position they are unqualified for and majorly screwing up at isn't doing anyone any favors.
Fully agree. My analogy fits here too.
> I'm not hoping they'll lose their job as a result
I have empathy for humans. It's not yet a thought crime to suggest that the existence of an LLM should be ended. The analogy would make me afraid of the future if I think about it too much.
I probably should have added sarcasm tags to my post. My very firm opinion is that AI should only make suggestions to humans and not decisions for humans.