AI Context vs. User Intent – a small Cursor observation

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1

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.

2

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.