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.
Edit: he did refund 22 mins after seeing this
This person is not the only one to experiencing this bug. As this thread has pointed out.
The best case scenario is that you lied about having people answer support. LLMs pretending to be people (you named it Sam!) and not labeled as such is clearly intended to be deceptive. Then you tried to control the narrative on reddit. So forgive me if I hit that big red DOUBT button.
Even in your post you call it "AI-assisted responses" which is as weaselly as it gets. Was it a chatbot response or was a human involved?
But 'a chatbot messed up' doesn't explain how users got locked out in the first place. EDIT: I see your comment about the race condition now. Plausible but questionable.
So the other possible scenario is that you tried to hose your paying customers then when you saw the blowback blamed it on a bot.
'We missed the mark' is such a trope non-apology. Write a better one.
I had originally ended this post with "get real" but your company's entire goal is to replace the real with the simulated so I guess "you get what you had coming". Maybe let your chatbots write more crap code that your fake software engineers push to paying customers that then get ignored and/or lied to when they ask your chatbots for help. Or just lie to everyone when you see blowback. Whatever. Not my problem yet because I can write code well enough that I'm embarrassed for my entire industry whenever I see the output from tools like yours.
This whole "AI" psyop is morally bankrupt and the world would be better off without it.
Slightly related to this; I just wanted to ask whether all Cursor email inboxes are gated by AI agents? I've tried to contact Cursor via email a few times in the past, but haven't even received an AI response :)
Cheers!
HN goes a step further. It has a function that allows moderators to kill or boost a post by subtracting or adding a large amount to the post's score. HN is primarily a place for Y Combinator to hype their latest venture, and a "safe" place for other startups and tech companies.
Are you truely that cheap? Is this why it took you guys 3 months to get a basic contract back to us?
The team I work with it took nearly 3 months to get basic questions answered correctly when it came to a sales contract. They never gave our Sec team acceptable answers around privacy and security.
Reddit is free to play for marketing firms. Perhaps they could add extra statistics, analytics, promotions for these commercial users.
AI fixes most of that... Most of the time? Clearly not, but hey.
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. It's not production code, it will be very obvious whether or not AI output works, and I very rarely touch docker and don't care to become a super expert in it. So I prompted the change, and it was good enough and so I ran with it.
You using AI for support tells me that you don't care about support. Which tells me whether or not I should be your customer.
I agree with you, they should care.
Also, illegal in the EU.
Because we all know how well people pay attention to such clear labels, even seasoned devs not just “end users”⁰.
Also, deleting public view of the issue (locking & hiding the reddit thread) tells me a lot about how much I should trust the company and its products, and as such I will continue to not use them.
--------
[0] though here there the end users are devs
That an LLM then invented a reason when asked by users why they're being logged out isn't that surprising. While not impossible, I don't think there's currently indication that they intended to change policy and are just blaming it on a hallucination as a scape goat.
And what’s a customer supposed to do with that information? Know that they can’t trust it? What’s the point then?
Seems like you are still blaming the user for his “very slow internet”.
How do you know the user internet was slow? Couldn’t a race condition like this exist anyway with regular 2 fast internet connections competing for the same sessions?
Something doesn’t add up.
this is a completely reasonable and seemingly quite transparent explaination.
if you want a conspiracy, there are better places to look.
Do they advertise that there's no support when you pay $20? I'm gonna take a guess that they don't.
They are getting paid by their customers and if they can't sustain their business (which includes support) with it they are under pricing their product and should have consequences for it.
A business is a business and we should stop treating startups as special. They operate on the same rules and standards that everyone else does.
Also, from the first comment in the post:
> Unfortunately, this is an incorrect response from a front-line AI support bot.
Well, this actually hurts.. a lot! I believe one of the key pillars of making a great company is customer support, which represents the soul or the human part of the company.
I've gotten a lot of value out of it over the past year, and often feel that I'm underpaying for what I'm getting.
To me, any type of business is a business. I'd treat Cursor as special because it is special.
Instead of saying "race condition that appears on very slow internet connections", you might say "race condition caused by real-world network latencies that our in-office testing didn't reveal" or some shit.
Idk. It’s just growing pains. Companies that grow quickly have problems. Imma keep using https://cline.bot and Claude 3.7.
If you can't sustain a business, it shouldn't exist?
I agree with this. Also, whenever I care about code, I don’t use AI. So I very rarely use AI assistants for coding.
I guess this is why Cursor is interested in making AI assistants popular everywhere, they don’t want the association that “AI assisted” means careless. Even when it does, at least with today’s level of AI.
They will utterly fail to build for a community of users if they don't have anyone on-hand who can tell them what a terrible idea that was
To the cofounder: hire someone (ideally with some thoughtful reluctance around AI, who understands what's potentially lost in using it) who will tell you your ideas around this are terrible. Hire this person before you fuck up your position in benevolent leadership of this new field
Literally no one wants this. The entire purpose of contacting support is to get help from a human.
https://old.reddit.com/r/cursor/comments/1jyy5am/psa_cursor_...
(For reference, here it is in reveddit https://www.reveddit.com/v/cursor/comments/1jyy5am/psa_curso... - text from post was unfortunately not saved)
It's already locked and with a stickied comment from a dev clarifying what happened
Did you remove it so people can't find about this screwup when searching Google?
Anyway, if you acknowledge it was a mistake to remove the thread, could you please un-remove it?
Hi <makingstuffs>,
I'm Michael, the founder and CEO of Cursor. I noticed you recently canceled your subscription, and I wanted to check in. If we fell short for you, I want to learn why and make it right.
First, if you'd like me to refund your account, please just reply to this email to let me know. I'd be happy to.
Second, could you share a sentence or two on what you disliked about Cursor? Or perhaps a screenshot of where it performed poorly? This will help us improve the product for future users.
I'd be very grateful to understand your candid thoughts. I'm listening and eager to fix our experience for you. Wishing you the best in any case!
Best, Michael
And my reply which I never got a response to:
Hi Michael,
Thanks for reaching out. I have honestly found that recent updates to the app have been extremely detrimental to the DX and productivity. A couple big issues I have found:
1. Removing the floating component window and providing no way to get it back. As a dev who is often travelling and working from a laptop screen I found the floating window to be extremely handy and its removal essentially meant I just do not use the composer anymore.
2. Constantly overriding VSCode native shortcuts. This is the most detrimental thing I have experienced, personally. Shortcuts are crucial to productivity and are engrained in muscle memory over years. Overriding them is essentially removing years of learned behaviour (things like cmd + shift + l)
3. The floating completion windows. These often end up overlapping my code code and break my flow. I have to press escape to close it and the whole experience is just jarring
4. Making the cursor dance around the screen when suggesting completions. I get that completions can sometimes be handy but moving my cursor when I am in the flow just makes me rethink what I am doing so that I can read a guess as to what I want which is often incorrect.
5. Poor suggestions. In the past month (maybe two?) I have noticed the quality of prompts is not up to par. I often find that Cursor will do weird things like import `jest.Mock` in my unit tests when I have not used jest in any repo which I have been actively maintaining since using cursor.
As for the refund I will leave that decision for you. I knew I was entering beta software when I ordered accepted the terms so I wouldn't be annoyed as such. Though, saying that, I do find myself using cursor a lot less now and am going to most likely shift back to plain VSCode as a result of the above.
If I think of anything else I will let you know.
Thanks,
Love, Peace and Happiness,
<makingstuffs>
We spent almost 2 months fighting with you guys about basic questions any B2B SaaS should be able to answer us. Things such as invoicing, contracts, and security policies. This was for a low 6 figure MRR deal.
When your sales rep responds "I don't know" or "I will need to get back to you" for weeks about basic questions it left us with a massive disappointment. Please do better, however we have moved to Copilot.
Same with scaling- what's hard is scaling good quality, not just scaling, so without good AI you've again gained nothing
You're imagining that if you get the answer you want from the AI you hang up the phone, and if you don't you're imagining a human will pick up and have the political power and will to overrule the AI. I think it's more realistic is the way things have played out here: nobody took or had any responsibility because "they made the AI responsible" and second-guessing that choice isn't second-guessing the AI, it's second-guessing the human leaders who decreed that human support had no value. This with the result that the humans would let the AI go about as far as setting fire to the building before some kind of human element imbued with any real accountability steps in. The evidence of this is all the ignored requests presented here.