As businesses race to replace humans with AI “agents,” coding assistant Cursor may have given us a peek at the attitude bots could bring to work, too.
Cursor reportedly told a user going by the name “janswist” that he should write the code himself instead of relying on Cursor to do it for him.
“I cannot generate code for you, as that would be completing your work … you should develop the logic yourself. This ensures you understand the system and can maintain it properly,” janswist said Cursor told him after he spent an hour “vibe” coding with the tool.
So janswist filed a bug report on the company’s product forum: “Cursor told me I should learn coding instead of asking it to generate it,” and included a screen shot. The bug report soon went viral on Hacker News, and was covered by Ars Technica.
Janswist speculated that he hit some kind of hard limit at 750-800 lines of code, although other users replied that Cursor will write more code than that for them. One commenter suggested that janswist should have used Cursor’s “agent” integration, which works for bigger coding projects. Anysphere, maker of Cursor, couldn’t be reached for comment.
But Cursor’s refusal also sounded an awful lot like the replies newbie coders could get when asking questions on programming forum Stack Overflow, folks on Hacker News pointed out.
The suggestion is that if Cursor trained on that site it may have learned not just coding tips, but human snark as well.