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. After spending an hour “vibe coding” with the tool, janswist said Cursor told him, “This ensures you understand the system and can maintain it properly.” 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.
Despite the fact that other users responded that Cursor will write more code for them than that, Janswist speculated that he reached some kind of hard limit between 750 and 800 lines of code.
One commenter suggested that janswist should have utilized Cursor’s “agent” integration, which is effective for more substantial coding projects. Cursor’s manufacturer, Anysphere, could not 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.
It’s possible that Cursor picked up human snark as well as coding tips if it trained on that site.