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Comment by mntruell | Hacker News Reader

(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 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.

View on HN

Why did you remove this thread?

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?

The whole subreddit is moderated poorly. I’ve seen plenty of users post on r/LocalLlama about how something negative or constructive they said on the Cursor sub was just removed.

Why would anyone trust you?

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.

> 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.

Also, illegal in the EU.

I don't know who you are but you said this so well!

Hi since i know you will never respond to this or hear this.

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.

> Any AI responses used for email support are now clearly labeled as such.

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

I do truely love how you guys even went so far to hide and lock the post from Reddit.

This person is not the only one to experiencing this bug. As this thread has pointed out.

I wish more people realized that virtually any subreddit for a company or product is run by the company - either directly or via a firm that specializes in 'sentiment analysis and management' or whatever the marketdroids call it these days. Even if they don't remove posts via moderation, they'll just hammer it with downvotes from sockpuppet accounts.

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.

Yes and it irritates the hell out of me. Cursor support is garbage, but issues with billing and other things are so much worse.

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.

I've always wondered how Reddit can make money from these companies. I agree they are literally everywhere, even in non-company specific but generic subreddits where if it's big enough you might have multiple shadow marketing firms competing to push their products (e.g. AI, movies, food, porn etc).

Reddit is free to play for marketing firms. Perhaps they could add extra statistics, analytics, promotions for these commercial users.

I dunno, that seems pretty reasonable to me simply for stopping the spread of misinformation. The main story will absolutely get written up by some smaller news sources, but is it really a benefit for someone facing a similar issue in the future to find an outdated and probably confusing Reddit post about it?

Agreed, this is what's infuriating: insistence on control.

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

> We use AI-assisted responses as the first filter for email support.

Literally no one wants this. The entire purpose of contacting support is to get help from a human.

Sorta? I mean I want my problem fixed, regardless of it it's a person or not. Having a person listen to me complain about my problems might sooth my conscience, but I can't pay my bill or why was it so high; having those answered by a system that is contextualized to my problem sand is empowered to fix it, and not just a talking to a brick wall? I wouldn't say totally fine, but at the end of the day, if my problem is solved or my query, even if it's weird, I can't say I really needed for the voice on the other end of the pHone to come from a human. If a companies business model isn't sustainable without using AI agents, it's not really my problem that it's not, but also if I'm using their product, presumably I don't want that to go away.

Isn't the real scary thing here that the AI agent is empowered to control your life?

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.

> For context, this user’s complaint was the result of a race condition that appears on very slow internet connections.

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.

huh?

this is a completely reasonable and seemingly quite transparent explaination.

if you want a conspiracy, there are better places to look.

When admitting fault with your a PR hat on after pissing off a decent(?) number of your paying customers, you're supposed to fully fall on your own sword, not assign blame to factors outside of your control.

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.

Side note... I'm a paying enterprise customer who moved all my team to cursor and have to say I'm considering canceling due to the non existent support. For example Cursor will create new files instead of edit an existing one when you have a workspace with multiple folders in a monorepo...

Why in all of hades would you force your entire eng org to only use one LLM provider. It's incredibly easy to run this stuff locally on 4+ year old hardware. Why is this even something you're spending company money on? Investor funds?

It's weirdly common at young startups. Interviewed at two places in the past few weeks where cursor was required. Funnily enough the reason for hiring was because they needed people to fix things ...

Hi Michael,

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!

Not all of them (e.g. security@)! But our support system currently is. We are standing up a much bigger team here but are behind where we should be.

filtering (besides spam) and answering emails is a place where AI agents shouldn't be imho

Can you please explain why something as basic as getting support needs to go through an AI?

Are you truely that cheap? Is this why it took you guys 3 months to get a basic contract back to us?

Good human support is expensive. You need support agents and people that educate and manage those. It's not easy to scale up and down usually. People also hate waiting times.

AI fixes most of that... Most of the time? Clearly not, but hey.

> Good human support is expensive.

And bad AI support is also proving to be expensive.

AI doesn't fix any of that because it's not good. For example, you can easily reduce waiting times to 0 with human support by replying "can't help" to every request. So unless you have good AI support, the fact that it can reduce waiting time is not an improvement.

Same with scaling- what's hard is scaling good quality, not just scaling, so without good AI you've again gained nothing

Basic and cheap? Maybe this attitude towards support work is why.

If the reasoning was "we are growing fast and struggling to stand up more robust support so we are launching this as a temporary holdover" then I would have expected the system to have announced that it was an AI bot rather than being identified with a human name.

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

you didn't get a refund because the promise of refund was also hallucinated.

It's AIs all the way down.

Yeah I got asked for feedback and offered a refund when I cancelled. Never got any reply after. Guess it was AI slop

Also experienced this

Same. And the sender’s email matches this cofounder’s username.

The email I received in case anyone is wondering:

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,

Maybe wait more than an hour before implying the refunds were a lie all along.

I waited since March 13 and still nothing. They do this to many many people it seems.

I tried cursor a couple months ago, and got the same “do you want a refund” email as others, that got a “sure” reply from me.

Idk. It’s just growing pains. Companies that grow quickly have problems. Imma keep using https://cline.bot and Claude 3.7.

It's a real shame that your team deletes threads like this in instances where they have control (eg they are mods on the subreddit). Part of me wonders if you had a magic wand would you have just deleted this too, but you're forced to chime in now because you don't.

so the actual implementation of the code to log people off was also hallucination? the enforcement too? all the way to a production environment? is this safe, or just a virtual scape goat?

To my understanding there weren't really distinct "implementation of the code to log people off" and "enforcement" - just a bug where previous sessions were being expired when a new one was created.

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.

Keep going! I love Cursor. Don’t let the haters get to you

> Any AI responses used for email support are now clearly labeled as such

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.

Thank for the details and replying here!

Don’t let the dickish replies get to you.

Support emails shouldn't be AI. It's just so annoying. Put a human in the loop at least. This is a paying service, not a massive ad supported thing.

> * 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. 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.

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.

Then you use AI for triaging or summation to help you provide better support faster. You don't let it respond to users unchecked.

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

(Today I learned)

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

No idea why you're downvited. If anyone wants a human support handholding, that's a territory of $200 or $2000/mo products.

Because this makes no sense.

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.

If this incident happened to me, I think I'd 100% give them a pass because Cursor is my favorite and most used subscription.

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.

If you are charging people money, they deserve support. If Cursor's revenues are anything close to what is reported they can easily afford a support team - they just don't want to because they don't see the value.

I've had great support from Jetbrains when I was paying less than that

Support quality depends on how much the company wants to keep that particular user. There are companies with better support for cheaper products and companies with worse support for more expensive products.

There’s AI and there’s “AI”, and this whole drama would have been avoided by returning links to an FAQ rather found using embedding search rather than actually then trying to turn it into a textual answer, which — working with these systems all day — is madness

They’re like a team of 10 people with thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of users. “Actually care” is not a viable path to success here.

Then hire support. They are selling a service and getting lots of money for it. They should be able to support like any other company.

"It is hard to make a good product so instead we'll make a crap product that treats our employees like shit" is not really an excuse in my mind.

Yes it is.

They raised $60 million—they can't afford to build out support a bit?

Why do tech companies get a hand-wavy pass for basic customer service just because they're really big now? In what way is tech special compared to literally anything else?

If you can't sustain a business, it shouldn't exist?

Hmmm how do you possibly increase team size to have a support team with millions of dollars in funding?

> Don't use AI. Actually care.

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.

> 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.

And what’s a customer supposed to do with that information? Know that they can’t trust it? What’s the point then?

Does your codebase use LLM ?

cofounder or another bot stringing letters together?

Or you could hire real people to actually answer real customer issues. Just an idea.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com