Cursor IDE support hallucinates lockout policy, causes user cancellations

[scaredpelican]

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.

[nerdjon]

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.

[lynguist]

https://www.anthropic.com/research/tracing-thoughts-language...

The section about hallucinations is deeply relevant.

Namely, Claude sometimes provides a plausible but incorrect chain-of-thought reasoning when its “true” computational path isn’t available. The model genuinely believes it’s giving a correct reasoning chain, but the interpretability microscope reveals it is constructing symbolic arguments backward from a conclusion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit

This empirically confirms the “theory of bullshit” as a category distinct from lying. It suggests that “truth” emerges secondarily to symbolic coherence and plausibility.

This means knowledge itself is fundamentally symbolic-social, not merely correspondence to external fact.

Knowledge emerges from symbolic coherence, linguistic agreement, and social plausibility rather than purely from logical coherence or factual correctness.

[mntruell]

(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.

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.

Appreciate all the feedback. Will help improve the experience for future users.

[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.

[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.

[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...

[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.

[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

[dkersten]

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)

[d357r0y3r]

Cline is pretty solid and doesn't require you to use a completely unsustainable VSCode fork.

[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.

[htrp]

cant bother fixing their issues because they are too busy vibe coding new features

[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.

[tintor]

"Any real alternatives?"

I use Zed with `3.7 sonnet`.

[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.

[ozataman]

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.

[amiantos]

Claude Code CLI is amazing and I am very confused as to why no one in 24 hours has recommended it.

[bytesandbits]

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.

[JohnKemeny]

> Their customer support is terrible.

You just don't know how to prompt it correctly.

[Crosseye_Jack]

sounds like perfect grounds for a chargeback to me. Company offered a full refund via one of its Agents, company then refused to honour that offer, time to make your bank force them to refund you.

Just because you use AI for customer service doesn't mean you don't have to honour its offers to customers. Air Canada recently lost a case where its AI offered a discount to a customer but then refused to offer it "IRL"

https://www.forbes.com/sites/marisagarcia/2024/02/19/what-ai...

[einsteinx2]

Same exact thing happened to me. I tried out Vursor after hearing all the hype and canceled after a few weeks. Got an email asking if I wanted a refund and asking for any feedback. I replied with detailed feedback on why I canceled and accepted the refund offer, then never heard back from them.

[samanator]

Interesting. The same thing happened to me. Was offered a refund (graciously, as I had forgotten to cancel the subscription). And after thanking them and agreeing to the refund, was promptly ignored!

Very strange behavior honestly.

[pzo]

I had the same exact experience - after disappointment (couldn't use like 2/3 of my premium credits because every second request failed after they upgraded to 0.46) unsubscribed. They offered refund in email. I replied I wanted refund but no reply

[PaulStatezny]

This reminds me of how small of a team they are, and makes me wonder if they have a customer support team that's growing commensurately with the size of the user base.

[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.

[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.

[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!

[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.

[permo-w]

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

[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.

[_fat_santa]

What I don't understand is why maintain a fork instead of just an extension? I would assume an extension like this would be pretty difficult to create but would it be more difficult than literally forking VSCode?

[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"

[Aeolun]

They can just drop any free usage right?

[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?

[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.

[zb3]

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"..

[dylan604]

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.

[tshaddox]

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.

[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.

[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)

[mindwok]

Wow. This one will go down in the history books as an example of AI hype outpacing AI capability.

[hedayet]

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.

[burnte]

Remember: They think you should trust their AI's output with your codebase.

[xyst]

AI bubble popping yet? Looking forward to not buying GPUs that cost $2K (before tariffs…).

[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.

[pvdebbe]

Some time ago, in an electronics online shop I asked about warranty terms from a chatbot and got favorable answers. It didn't take two hours before a human contacted me via email to correct a misunderstanding.