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Cursor IDE support hallucinates lockout policy, causes user cancellations

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Re: Cursor IDE support hallucinates lockout policy, causes user cancellations

#201

Post by permo-w »

dkersten wrote: post #173
ddxv wrote: post #31

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).

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 mod…

I find that if you turn off telemetry (i.e. turn on privacy) the resource hogging slows down a lot

Re: Cursor IDE support hallucinates lockout policy, causes user cancellations

#202

Post by seabird »

theonething wrote: post #179
schmichael wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> I can't think of another development tool we'd say this about. Because no other dev tool actually generates unique code like AI does. So you treat it like the other components of your team that generates code, the other developers. Do you trust other developers to write good code without mistakes without getting it reviewed by others. Of course not.

Yes, actually, I do! I trust my teammates with tens of thousands of hours of experience in programming, embedded hardware, our problem spaces, etc. to write from a fully formed worldview, and for their code to work as intended (as far as anybody can tell before it enters preliminary testing by users) by the time the rest of the team reviews it. Most code review is uneventful. Have some pride in your work and you'll be amazed at what's possible.

Re: Cursor IDE support hallucinates lockout policy, causes user cancellations

#203

Post by permo-w »

cs702 wrote: post #143

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. Sig…

trying to "fix hallucinations" is like trying to fix humans being wrong. it's never going to happen. we can maybe iterate towards an asymptote, but we're never going to "fix hallucinations"

Re: Cursor IDE support hallucinates lockout policy, causes user cancellations

#205

Post by leoh »

SkyPuncher wrote: post #169
jgb1984 wrote: post #125

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 ha…

> 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.

Good employee, you get cookie and 1h extra pto

Re: Cursor IDE support hallucinates lockout policy, causes user cancellations

#206

Post by skissane »

ModernMech wrote: post #75
nerdjon wrote: post #63

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.

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 o…

> 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.

This is not an inherent flaw of LLMs, rather it is a flaw of a particular implementation-if you use guided sampling, so during sampling you only consider tokens allowed by the programming language grammar at that position, it becomes impossible for the LLM to generate ungrammatical output

> When it does this, I feel the hallucinations can be off the charts -- inventing APIs, function names, entire libraries,

They can use guided sampling for this too - if you know the set of function names which exist in the codebase and its dependencies, you can reject tokens that correspond to non-existent function names during sampling

Another approach, instead of or as well as guided sampling, is to use an agent with function calling - so the LLM can try compiling the modified code itself, and then attempt to recover from any errors which occur.

Re: Cursor IDE support hallucinates lockout policy, causes user cancellations

#207

Post by permo-w »

theturtletalks wrote: post #49

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.

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

Re: Cursor IDE support hallucinates lockout policy, causes user cancellations

#208

Post by myko »

novaRom wrote: post #62
xyst wrote: post #27

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

1) there is no AI bubble, it has revolutionized how we communicate and learn 2) you don't need to buy an expensive GPU for local LLM, any contemporary laptop with enough RAM is sufficient to run an uncensored Gemma-3 fast

I'm shocked by this perspective, and I'm deep into the LLM game (shipped 7 figure products using LLMs). I don't feel like anything has been revolutionized around communication - I can spot AI generated emails pretty easily (just send the prompt, people). On the learning front I do find LLMs to be more capable search engines for many tasks, so they're helpful absolutely.

Re: Cursor IDE support hallucinates lockout policy, causes user cancellations

#209

Post by ericwood »

cachvico wrote: post #166
jgb1984 wrote: post #125

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 ha…

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…

I have a hard time being sold on “yea it’s wrong a lot, also you have to spend more time than you already do on code review.”

Getting to sit down and write the code is the most enjoyable part of the job, why would I deprive myself of that? By the time the problem has been defined well enough to explain it to an LLM sitting down and writing the code is typically very simple.

Re: Cursor IDE support hallucinates lockout policy, causes user cancellations

#210

Post by ivan_gammel »

SkyPuncher wrote: post #169
jgb1984 wrote: post #125

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 ha…

> 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.

How do you define code quality in this case and what is your stack?
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