Cancelling Cursor

I've been a Cursor fan - and a paying customer - for years. I still remember the first time I tried that magical tab-completion, the "shut up and take my money" moment 2 years ago. But it's getting harder and harder to justify the subscription.

TLDR

Cursor is:

• always stuck on an old VSCode version (months behind, breaks extensions)
• shoving the Agent window in my face every other update, and the setting to turn it off is moved every time
• buggy
• unresponsive to support, bug reports sit on their "feedback forum" for months
• (most importantly) is in a tough position, trying to pivot away from a "code-first" AI tool

The VSCode upstream issue

This has been a problem for years now. Cursor is always based on a 7-8 month old VSCode build on average, and that matters because extension updates simply refuse to install.

For the last 10 months Cursor has been based on VSCode release 1.105.0. Before that - a similar 9-month cycle on version 1.99.3. Two weeks ago they bumped the version to 1.125.0 which is already 7 releases behind.

10 months is a big deal. This industry moves at an insane pace right now - the entire AI coding space reinvents itself every couple of months. Models get replaced, agents show up, whole categories of tools appear and die within 2 months.

The Agent window

After almost every update, Cursor decides it now boots into the "Agent" view by default. You switch back to the IDE, restart the app - and you're back in the Agent view again. And the setting that controls this is moved and renamed every time.

This is currently the most discussed topic on Cursor's own forum

At this point I really can't tell whether it's an honest bug or a deliberate dark pattern to guide people into the new view. Neither answer is great. Anyway, shout out for Colin, the support rep answering these threads - he didn't make this decision, but he has to stand up for it.

I get that Cursor is trying to prioritize the agentic workflow but the thing is - when I really need an agent, I'll just use Codex and Claude Code. Ironically, I can do that right inside Cursor. Claude and Codex "Max" plans already make more sense than paying Cursor to resell the same underlying models.

Bugs

I've reported about 7 bugs during the last year, all of them still unfixed (sometimes even unanswered).

For example this is Cursor's settings window. On a wide monitor the label sits on the far left.

And the checkbox it belongs to - all the way over on the far right, a mile of empty space in between. This is a five-second CSS fix. I reported it four months ago.

The real question is not "why is this bug there" - every product has dumb bugs. The question is: are they understuffed? Is there QA? Have they ever used their own product on anything bigger than a 13" MacBook?

About four months ago I got tired of shouting into the feedback forum, so I wrote all of this up as a post on Cursor's own subreddit. Same list, roughly: the stale VSCode base, the Agent window that won't stay dismissed, the bug reports going nowhere.

It hit 177 upvotes, then got deleted by the mods for some reason. Still, 177 upvotes is not one grumpy guy with a niche setup - that's a couple hundred developers agreeing "yeah, this, I have the same problem". That's free product research, the kind most companies pay an agency for.

Summing it all up: forum threads nobody answers, a support mailbox that fires back an AI-generated non-answer, community posts removed... That's the support level I'd expect from an open-source side project maintained by one exhausted dude in his evenings, not from a company that is about to be acquired for $60bil.

The SpaceX deal

When that deal was first announced I thought - great. Now Cursor can stop worrying about reselling tokens at a margin and finally concentrate on building a great AI-powered IDE.

Right?

Unfortunately, every signal since points the other way - more agents, more "platform", less editor. Cursor wants to stop being "code-first". The IDE is starting to look like the thing they inherited on the way to becoming an enterprise agent vendor. Basically "Codex for SpaceX".

Which might be a perfectly good choice. Just not the product I subscribed to.

Credit where it's due

I don't want this to read as pure hate. Cursor were the pioneers. They were the first ones to make "AI in your editor" feel like something other than a party trick. Inline diffs you could accept hunk by hunk, a chat that actually knew about the rest of your codebase from vector embeddings, tab-completion that jumped to the next place you were going to edit anyway. All of that is table stakes now, in every editor, and it's table stakes because Cursor shipped it first while everyone else was still bolting a chat sidebar and calling it innovation.

They genuinely changed how I write code every day. Pretty much every AI coding tool I use now is walking a path Cursor paved.

But that was then.

I understand they're in a very tough spot r/n, the "developers who read code" crowd is becoming too small of a TAM I guess. And open source alternatives are killing your margins, leaving opportunity for the first-party model companies only.

But still. Cancelled. I'll happily come back the day they decide they're an IDE company again. Until then I'm back on VSCode (and not having to deal with Cursor's busted VSCode extensions due to licensing is an instant bonus too).