Agent edits sometimes not saving file to disk

Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

Cursor IDE

Describe the Bug

Sometimes when the agent applies a patch to a file, the changes are applied locally in the VSCode editor buffer but not saved to disk. This is indicated by the unsaved “dot” icon on the tab in the GUI. Then the agent gets stuck in a death spiral of:

  • Read file; observe change unapplied.
  • Call patch tool; patch tool makes no changes.
  • Try to build; build still fails.
  • Repeat.
    If I catch it in time I can manually save the file and it will recover, but often it wastes too much context and I have to try the whole prompt again.

Steps to Reproduce

I don’t have a specific repro unfortunately. It doesn’t happen all that often. Best I can tell, my workflow that causes this is:

Agent:

  • gpt-5-fast
  • Do some research and build context for a large refactor.
  • Perform the refactor, editing 5+ files.
  • Build and start iterating on build errors.
  • Make minor changes to fix build errors

Me, concurrently with agent:

  • Accept and reject chunks of code.
  • Queue up chat guidance to the agent for rejected code.

My best guess is that it’s a race condition between rejecting chunks and patching the same file at the same time.

This is a Windows 11 GUI developing on a Linux remote server.

Expected Behavior

The patch tool should always save changes to the source file. The agent should see its applied changes reflected in the build output.

Operating System

Windows 10/11
Linux

Current Cursor Version (Menu → About Cursor → Copy)

Version: 1.6.42 (user setup)
VSCode Version: 1.99.3
Commit: 5911e9593196a000b1c00553aaf03b0b32042b90
Date: 2025-09-20T17:16:56.346Z
Electron: 34.5.8
Chromium: 132.0.6834.210
Node.js: 20.19.1
V8: 13.2.152.41-electron.0
OS: Windows_NT x64 10.0.26100

For AI issues: which model did you use?

gpt-5-fast

For AI issues: add Request ID with privacy disabled

Security policy at my workplace disallows disabling privacy.

Does this stop you from using Cursor

Sometimes - I can sometimes use Cursor

This topic was automatically closed 22 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.