Opening a freshly cloned repo in Cursor shouldn’t automatically execute a binary within that repo.
Edit: yes I get that there's a trust system, but I know a lot of people just trust everything in a directory.
You then take the default of Windows execution order of: look for the executable in the current folder otherwise check the PATHs in order. This is a Windows security issue which has been around since day one.
To me the App is preparing to do some work so it is more responsive to my requests. This is a classic trade off between security and performance, where the odds of a malicious virus being in the root of your project are very small if you are already taking best practices.
Perhaps what we really need is Microsoft to change the execution order and that the maintainers of Git add a new feature where we can block executables being in the root of a repo (or in the whole of a repo). That would prevent every app having to make the same workaround, fix the issue upstream and you'll never have to think about it again.
Of course that then leads you down the rabbit hole of whether the llm should exectute a known-good ripgrep, tree, etc. instead of depending on PATH resolution