Cursor IDE support hallucinates lockout policy, causes user cancellations
170 comments
·April 14, 2025nerdjon
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.
ModernMech
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!
yodsanklai
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.
ryandrake
> 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.
schmichael
> 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.
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mediaman
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.
Mountain_Skies
Versioning in source control for even personal projects just got far more important.
AdrianEGraphene
It's wild how people write without version control... Maybe I'm missing something.
simeonww
[flagged]
jgb1984
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.
SkyPuncher
> 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.
callc
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.
klabb3
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.
aleph_minus_one
> I could have asked my knowledgeable friends and coworkers, but not at 11PM on a Saturday.
Get friends with weirder daily schedules. :-)
financypants
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
valenterry
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.
cachvico
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.
feisty0630
> Why would any self respecting software developer use this tripe?
The ones with self-respect aren't the ones using it
williamcotton
That’s a pretty mean spirited way to approach this subject.
warkdarrior
You hold onto your "self-respect" while I laugh all the way to the bank. Just like I did when I started using optimizing compilers, parser generators, IDEs, IDEs with autocompletion, SAST tools, etc.
rTX5CMRXIfFG
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
kerkeslager
Are you going to the bank to take out a loan? You're claiming you've outcompeted other programmers by using... optimizing compilers?
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grg0
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.
birdman3131
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.
rustc
> 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?
daemonologist
AI companies high on their own supply, that's who. Ultralytics is (in)famous for it.
recursive
A forward-thinking company that believes in the power of Innovation™.
sitkack
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...
behnamoh
"It's evolving, but backwards."
nkrisc
This is the future AI companies are selling. I believe they would 100%.
p1necone
An AI company dogfooding their own marketing. It's almost admirable in a way.
rangerelf
I worry that they don't understand the limitations of their own product.
xbar
I worry that the tally of those who do is much higher than is prudent.
conradfr
A lot of company actually, although 100% automation is still rare.
that_guy_iain
100% for first line support is very common. It was common years ago before ChatGPT and ChatGPT made it so much better than before.
pxx
OpenAI seems to do this. I've gotten complete nonsense replies from their support for billing questions.
that_guy_iain
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?
layer8
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.
recursive
Same reason they would have added checks all along. They care whether the information is correct.
isaacremuant
I think this would actually make them look worse, not better.
babypuncher
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.
sitkack
That is because AI runs PR as well.
xienze
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!”
6510
This is the best idea I read all day. Going to implement AI for everything right now. This is a must have feature.
throwaway314155
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.
joe_the_user
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...
kebokyo
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...
rurp
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.
keeganpoppen
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.
klabb3
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.
AstroBen
think about the demographic that would join a cursor subreddit. Basically 90% superfans. Go against the majority opinion and you'll be nuked
andybak
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.
dylan604
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!
omneity
This would only be complete in aggregate. We don’t know how many people signed up as a result.
scarface_74
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.
paxys
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.
tshaddox
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.
elcritch
Wow, I wish more services did that.
jay_kyburz
surely the first thing you do when you subscribe to Kagi is set your default browser search to Kagi.
mirekrusin
Really? Brilliant idea.
ddxv
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).
adriand
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.
dtquad
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.
pfg_
Copilot's tab completion is significantly worse than cursor's in my experience (only tried free copilot)
caelinsutch
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
d357r0y3r
Cline is pretty solid and doesn't require you to use a completely unsustainable VSCode fork.
alok-g
I have heard Roo Code is a fork of Cline that is better. I have never used either so far.
smaddox
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.
omneity
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.
behnamoh
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.
htrp
cant bother fixing their issues because they are too busy vibe coding new features
mushufasa
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.
throwaway314155
I have never rolled my eyes harder.
tintor
"Any real alternatives?"
I use Zed with `3.7 sonnet`.
cs702
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.
theturtletalks
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.
GabrielHawk
> 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.
john2x
> I don't understand why they don't fix this.
It makes number go up and to the right
sitkack
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"
null
AndyKelley
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.
ok_computer
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)
spartanatreyu
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.
mgraczyk
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?
dang
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.
Earlier 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.