I get this all the time when I’m asking about my files, even when I search with the codebase. “I apologize for any confusion, but as an AI, I don’t have direct access to your file system or codebase. I can only provide assistance based on the information, code snippets, and conversation history you’ve provided.”
I think that’s more of a pre-prompt issue. It gets the most relevant snippets from your codebase but no one tells it that it can actually “access the file system or codebase”.
what is the pre-prompt exactly?
Also, I’m not sure if this always works but I think I figured it out? I turned on “reasoning step” when doing run with codebase, made it gpt-3.5-cot, and upped the results to 400
You can ask the AI for the pre-prompt if you’d like.
And yea, the “Reasoning Step” is a more in-depth codebase search so it’s less likely to occur there.
Looks like the “reasoning step” function has been removed? its happening again now more often
Should still be there.
Have you found a fix? This is really annoying, especially with how frequently I use files in other folder. @Jakob
Are the any prompts that I could include beforehand? The best way I have found currently is asking it for what folder a file is in, then asking after.
I’m having the same issue and get the same message when I ask Cursor about my files. I created a /docs folder in my project’s root folder that Cursor says it does not have direct access to.
I’m confused what the Codebase indexing actually does if Cursor cannot see a folder with files in the root directory.
I know I can add individual files for context with a prompt, but I would like Cursor to read the files in the /docs folder to help me cross-link the related documents and create a table of contents in the README file. When I ask Cursor to do this, it makes up a bunch of folders and files. All the cross-linked files are imaginary.
Hey, how are you querying the AI?
If you are in the chat and composer, are you using the @ symbol to add them as context to your prompts?
This issue also happens for files that Cursor previously had access to, but stops having access to for some reason.
This happened to me couple of times times as well. Probably it is not intended but I noticed that when I start the chat using “Ask” it sometimes behave like this, when it is started with “Agent” there is no such issue.