When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
As businesses become eager to replace humans with AI tools, the Cursor AI coding assistant may have sent another signal to these brands, showing its reaction to voluminous work.
According to a report, Cursor told a user named “Janswist” that he should write the code himself instead of relying on Cursor to do it for him. The report reads, “I cannot generate code for you, as that would be completing your work… you should develop the logic yourself. This ensures you understand and can maintain the system 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 screenshot. The bug report soon went viral on Hacker News and was covered by Ars Technica.
Janswist speculated that he hit a hard limit at 750-800 lines of code, although other users replied that Cursor would write more code than that for them. One commenter suggested that Janswist should have used Cursor’s “agent” integration, which works for more significant coding projects. Anysphere, maker of Cursor, couldn’t be reached for comment.
But Cursor’s refusal also sounded like the replies newbie coders could get when asking questions on the programming forum Stack Overflow, folks on Hacker News pointed out.
If Cursor trained on that site, it might have learned not just coding tips but also human snark.
AI tools have become incorporated into human workflows; however, their limitations are equally becoming apparent. The experience of Janswist reaffirms the existential tension between automation and human involvement in coding.
By design, AI tools are meant to assist, but it may now be inferred that some tools, like Cursor AI coding assistant, are pushing back to ensure users stay engaged in problem-solving. The viral response suggests a broader conversation about AI’s role in coding: should it replace human effort entirely or merely support it?
