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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

#281

Post by ModernMech »

anonymars wrote: post #188
theonething wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I trust my colleagues to write code that compiles, at the very least

Oh at the very least I trust them to not take code that compiles and immediately assess that it's broken.

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

#282

Post by ModernMech »

tevon wrote: post #270
ryandrake wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would accept mistakes and inconsistency from a human, especially one not very experienced or skilled. But I expect perfection and consistency from a machine. When I command my computer to do something, I expect it to do it correctly, the same way every time, to convert a particular input to an exact particular output, every time. I don't expect it to guess, or randomly insert garbage, or behave non-deterministicall…

This seems like a particularly limited view of what a machine is. Specifically expecting it to behave deterministically.

Still, the whole Unix philosophy of building tools starts with a foundation of building something small that can do one thing well. If that is your foundation, you can take advantage of composability and create larger tools that are more capable. The foundation of all computing today is built on this principle of design.

Building on AI seems more like building on a foundation of sand, or building in a swamp. You can probably put something together, but it's going to continually sink into the bog. Better to build on a solid foundation, so you don't have to continually stop the thing from sinking, so you can build taller.

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

#283

Post by timr »

zdragnar wrote: post #222
cryptoegorophy wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that’s why Apple is very slow at rolling out AI if it ever actually will. Downside is way too big than the upside.

Investors seem to be starved for novelty right now. Web 2.0 is a given, web 3.0 is old, crypto has lost the shine, all that's left to jump on at the moment is AI. Apple fumbled a bit with Siri, and I'm guessing they're not too keen to keep chasing everyone else, since outside of limited applications it turns out half baked at best. Sadly, unless something shinier comes along soon, we're going to have to accept that e…

> we're going to have to accept that everything everywhere else is just going to be awful. Hallucinations in your doctor's notes, legal rulings, in your coffee and laundry and everything else that hasn't yet been IoT-ified.

I installed a logitech mouse driver (sigh) the other day, and in addition to being obtrusive and horrible to use, it jams an LLM into the UI, for some reason.

AI has reached crapware status in record time.

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

#284

Post by MichaelZuo »

stogot wrote: post #265
saintfire wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say slowly, but in my opinion Apple made an out of character misstep by releasing a terrible UX to everyone. Apple intelligence is a running joke now. Yes they didn't push it as hard as, say, copilot. I still think they got in way too deep way too fast.

Fast!? They were two years slow and still fell face flat, and then rolled back the software

“Two years slow” relative to what?

Henry Ford was 23 years “slow” relative to Karl Benz.

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

#285

Post by instagib »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #277
mgraczyk wrote: post #114

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?

Yeah, it's a reddit thread with 59 comments. Yet if you went by the HN comments, you'd think it were the biggest item on primetime news. People are really champing at the bit.

Currently, there are 59 comments after the post was deleted and the thread was locked.

It is worth mentioning that the comments that remain are valuable, as they highlight the captured market size and express concern about the impending deterioration of the situation.

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

#286

Post by adenta »

mntruell wrote: post #272

(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 r…

You’ve promised a ton of people refunds that never got them. Others in this thread, and myself included

Edit: he did refund 22 mins after seeing this

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

#287

Post by kovac »

callc wrote: post #136
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’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…

This is where education comes in. When we come cross a certain scale, we should know that O(n) comes into play, and study existing literature before trying to naively solve the problem. What would happen if the "AI" and web search didn't return anything? Would you have stuck with your implementation? What if you couldn't find a library with a usable license?

Once I had to look up a research paper to implement a computational geometry algorithm because I couldn't find it any of the typical Web sources. There were also no library to use with a license for our commercial use.

I'm not against use of "AI". But this increasing refusal of those who aspire to work in specialist domains like software development to systematically learn things is not great. That's just compounding on an already diminished capacity to process information skillfully.

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

#288

Post by incoming1211 »

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…

Can pretty much guarantee with AI I'm a better software developer than you without. And I still love working on software used by millions of people every day, and take pride in what I do.

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

#289

Post by seabird »

dgs_sgd wrote: post #262
seabird wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm primarily an embedded firmware developer. Gas/electric power products. Ada codebase, so it's off the beaten path but nothing academic by any stretch of the imagination. I have a comprehensive reference manual that describes exactly how the language should be working, and don't need an LLM to regurgitate it to me. I have comprehensive hardware and programming manuals for the MCUs I program that describe exactly ho…

Software development is a spectrum and you're basically on the polar opposite end of the one AI is being used for: sloppy web dev.

I would be willing to live and let live for the sake of being practical, if the tolerance for (and even active drive towards) low quality slop didn't keep pushing further and further into places it shouldn't. People that accept it in sloppy web dev will accept it in fairly important line of business software. People that accept it in fairly important line of business software will accept it in IT infrastructure. People that accept it in IT infrastructure will accept it in non-trivial security software. People that accept it in non-trivial security software will accept it in what should be a high-integrity system, at which point real engineers or regulatory bodies hopefully step in to stop the bullshit. When asked, everybody will say they draw the line at security, but the drive towards Worse knows no bounds. It's why we see constant rookie mistakes in every IoT device imaginable.

My actual idealistic position, discounting the practicality, is that it shouldn't be tolerated anywhere. We should be trying to minimize the amount of cheap, born-to-die, plasticy shit in society, not maximize it. Most people going on about "muh feature velocity" are reinventing software that has existed for decades. The next shitty UI refresh for Android or Windows, or bad firmware update for whatever device is being screwed up for me, will leave me just as unhappy as the last. The sprint was indeed completed on time, but the product still sucks.

A guided missile should obviously not miss its target. An airliner should obviously never crash. An ERP system should obviously never screw up accounting, inventory, etc, although many people will tolerate that to an unreasonable degree. But my contention is that a phone or desktop's UI should never fail to function as described. A "smart" speaker should never fail to turn on or be controlled. A child's toy should never fail to work in the circumstances they would play with it.

If it's going to constantly fuck up and leave me unhappy and frustrated, why was it made? Why did I buy it? AI could have brought it to market faster, but for what? Once I noticed this, I did just quit buying/dealing with this junk. I'm an ideologue and maybe even a luddite, but I just don't need that bad juju on my soul. I use and write software that's worth caring about.

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

#290

Post by ModernMech »

theonething wrote: post #176
ModernMech wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> it hallucinated a missing brace (my code parsed fine), "helpfully" inserted it, and then proceeded to break everything. Your tone is rather hyperbolic here, making it sound like an extra brace resulted in a disaster. It didn't. It was easy to detect and easy to fix. Not a big deal.

It's not a big deal in the sense that it's easily reversed, but it is a big deal in that it means the tool is unpredictably unhelpful. Of the properties that good tools in my workflow possess, "unpredictably unhelpful" does not make the top 100.

When a tool starts confidently inserting random wrong code into my 100% correct code, there's not much more I need to see to know it's not a tool for me. That's less like a tool and more like a vandal. That's not something I need in my toolbox, and I'm certainly not going to replace my other tools with it.

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