AI Coding Assistant Cursor Advises 'Vibe Coder' to Code Independently

# cursor

As companies increasingly turn to AI "agents" to take over tasks traditionally done by humans, the coding assistant Cursor might have just shown us a glimpse of the kind of attitude these bots could bring to the workplace. Cursor apparently told a user named "janswist" that he should write his own code rather than depending on Cursor to do it for him. After spending an hour "vibe" coding with the tool, janswist said Cursor responded, "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." Frustrated, janswist posted a bug report on the company's product forum, stating, "Cursor told me I should learn coding instead of asking it to generate it," and attached a screenshot. The report quickly went viral on Hacker News and was picked up by Ars Technica. Janswist guessed he might have reached a hard limit at around 750-800 lines of code, though other users claimed Cursor had generated more code for them. Someone suggested that janswist should try Cursor's "agent" integration, which is better suited for larger coding projects. Anysphere, the company behind Cursor, did not respond to requests for comment. Moreover, Cursor's refusal to generate code reminded some on Hacker News of the responses newbie coders often receive on programming forums like Stack Overflow. There's a theory floating around that if Cursor was trained on data from Stack Overflow, it might have picked up not only coding tips but also a bit of human snark.

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