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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

#411

Post by miki123211 »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #357
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.

> Apple made an out of character misstep by releasing a terrible UX to everyone What about Apple Maps? That roll-out was awful.

Apple had their hand forced by Google on that one afaik.

Yes they knew Apple maps was bad and not up to standard yet, but they didn't really have any other choice.

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

#412

Post by Tainnor »

threeseed wrote: post #335
anonzzzies wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did anyone say that? They are an issue everywhere, including for code. But with code at least I can have tooling to automatically check and feed back that it hallucinated libraries, functions etc, but with just normal research / problems there is no such thing and you will spend a lot of time verifying everything.

I use Scala which has arguably the best compiler/type system with Cursor. There is no world in which a compiler or tooling will save you from the absolute mayhem it can do. I’ve had it routinely try to re-implement third party libraries, modify code unrelated to what it was asked, quietly override functions etc. It’s like a developer who is on LSD.

I don't know Scala. I asked cursor to create a tutorial for me to learn Scala. It created two files for me, Basic.scala and Advanced.scala. The second one didn't compile and no matter how often I tried to paste the error logs into the chat, it couldn't fix the actual error and just made up something different.

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

#413

Post by trollied »

charlietango592 wrote: post #395
SCdF wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * 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. Don't use AI. Actually care. Like, take a step back, and realise you should give a shit about support for a paid product. Don't get me wrong: AI is a very effective tool, *for doing things you don't care about*. I had to do a random docker compose change the the other day. I…

Not trying to defend them, but I think it’s a problem of scaling up. The user base grew very quickly and keeping up with the support inquiries must be a tough job. Therefore the first like of defense is AI support replies. I agree with you, they should care.

Given how they started... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30011965

(Today I learned)

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

#414

Post by jmaker »

lynguist wrote: post #400
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.

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…

I haven’t used Cursor yet. Some colleagues have and seemed happy. I’ve had GitHub Copilot on for what feels like a couple years, a few days ago VS Code was extended to provide an agentic workflow, MCP, bring-your-own-key, it interprets instructions in a codebase. But the UX and the outputs are bad in over 3/4 of cases. It’s a nuisance to me. It injects bad code even though it has the full context. Is Cursor genuinely any better?

To me it feels like people that benefit from or at least enjoy that sort of assistance and I solve vastly different problems and code very differently.

I’ve done exhausting code reviews on juniors’ and middles’ PRs but what I’ve been feeling lately is that I’m reviewing changes introduced by a very naive poster. It doesn’t even type-check. Regardless of whether it’s Claude 3.7, o1, o3-mini, or a few models from Hugging Face.

I don’t understand how people find that useful. Yesterday I literally wasted half an hour for a test suite setup a colleague of mine introduced to the codebase that wasn’t good, and I tried delegating that fix to several of the Copilot models. All of them missed the point, some even introduced security vulnerabilities in the process invalidating JWT validation, I tried “vide coding” it till it works, until I gave up in frustration and just used an ordinary search engine, which led me to the docs, in which I immediately found the right knob. I reverted all that crap and did the simple and correct thing. So my conclusion was simple: vibe coding and LLMs made the codebase unnecessarily more complicated and wasted my time. How on earth do people code whole apps with that?

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

#415

Post by Tainnor »

ToValueFunfetti wrote: post #340
gitremote wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely not. We'd just do the calculations by hand, which is better than running the 95%-correct calculator and then doing the calculations by hand anyway to verify its output.

Suppose you work in a field where getting calculations right is critical. Your engineers make mistakes less than .01% of the time, but they do a lot of calculations and each mistake could cost $millions or lives. Double- and triple-checking help a lot, but they're costly. Here's a machine that verifies 95% of calculations, but you'd still have to do 5% of the work. Shall I throw it away? Unreliable tools have a good…

> Unreliable tools have a good deal of utility.

This is generally true when you can quantify the unreliability. E.g. random prime number tests with a specific error rate can be combined so that the error rates multiply and become negligible.

I'm not aware that we can quantify the uncertainty coming out of LLM tools reliably.

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

#416

Post by marcus_holmes »

dmitrygr wrote: post #301
theonething wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> with debian, python and vim Why are you cheapening the product, butchering the process and decimating any hope for further skill development by using these tools? Instead of python, you should be using assembly or heck, just binary. Instead of relying on an OS abstraction layer made by someone else, you should write everything from scratch on the bare metal. Don't lower yourself by using a text editor, go hex. Then…

I am unironically with you. I think people should start to learn from computer architecture and assembly and only then, after demonstrating proper skill, graduate to C, and after demonstrating skill there graduate to managed-memory languages.

I was lucky enough to start my programming journey coding in Assembler on the much, much simpler micro computers we had in my youth. I would not even vaguely know where to start with Assembler on a modern machine. We had three registers and a single contiguous block of addressable memory ffs. Likewise, the things I was taught about computer architecture and the fetch-execute cycle back in the 80's are utterly irrelevant now.

I think if you tried to start people off on the kinds of things we started off on in the 80's, you'd never get past the first lesson. It's all so much more complex that any student would (rightly!) give up before getting anywhere.

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

#417

Post by jmaker »

anonzzzies wrote: post #278
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.

Did anyone say that? They are an issue everywhere, including for code. But with code at least I can have tooling to automatically check and feed back that it hallucinated libraries, functions etc, but with just normal research / problems there is no such thing and you will spend a lot of time verifying everything.

Until the model injects a subtle change to your logic that does type-check and then goes haywire in production. Just takes a colleague of yours under pressure and another one to review the PR, and then you’re on call and they out sick or on vacation.

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

#418

Post by jmaker »

threeseed wrote: post #335
anonzzzies wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did anyone say that? They are an issue everywhere, including for code. But with code at least I can have tooling to automatically check and feed back that it hallucinated libraries, functions etc, but with just normal research / problems there is no such thing and you will spend a lot of time verifying everything.

I use Scala which has arguably the best compiler/type system with Cursor. There is no world in which a compiler or tooling will save you from the absolute mayhem it can do. I’ve had it routinely try to re-implement third party libraries, modify code unrelated to what it was asked, quietly override functions etc. It’s like a developer who is on LSD.

Granted the Scala language is much more complex than Go. To produce something useful it must be capable of an equivalent of parsing the AST.

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

#419

Post by throwawaysleep »

SCdF wrote: post #380
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…

> * 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. Don't use AI. Actually care. Like, take a step back, and realise you should give a shit about support for a paid product. Don't get me wrong: AI is a very effective tool, *for doing things you don't care about*. I had to do a random docker compose change the the other day. I…

The amount paid is still pretty trivial. I wouldn’t expect much human support for most SaaS products costing $20 a month.
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