Loving Cursor so far – great experience overall.
Today I ran a prompt that referenced some fonts, and the AI did something clever: it found those fonts in a different folder on my disk and copied them into my project. Super helpful… but also unexpected.
I hadn’t added that folder to my workspace, so it surprised me that Cursor could reach outside the project like that. I know this is technically supported, but it raised a small concern: if the AI can access files beyond the project folder, what else could it reach? Other files? Apps?
Maybe a bit more clarity or confirmation around that kind of access would help. Not a complaint—just an observation. Really excited to keep using it.
Hi Tom, welcome to the forum and Cursor community.
In Cursor you have the ability to restrict modifications to outside files in Auto-run mode or deletions in general.
Depending on your setup and programming language AI should usually not need to access any folders/files outside of the actual project folder.
Any application running on your machine under your user has mostly the same permissions for accessing files and folders.
There are exceptions:
- On MacOS many apps are sandboxed so they may not access other apps files/folders. This does not exist on Windows.
- Certain OS related folders on MacOS and Windows are not accessible by apps
- However fonts likely are because they must be accessible to apps for font usage.
Could you tell a bit more what you tried and how AI accessed those files?
Feel free to ask anything about Cursor you would like to know.