Cursor agent keeps asking for "Accept" for file edits

Bug Reports
1

Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

Cursor IDE

Describe the Bug

The cursor agent seems to keep asking for “Accept” the edits for agent mode, even if the cursor agent is set to mode “run everything”.

I am working on local windows machine, ssh into the remote cursor in ubuntu 24.04 for development.

This issue seems to be

  1. Repo-specific. Seperate repos will have seperate behaviours on whether or not “asking for edits” or not.
  2. Not happening at beginning
    • I [1] delete everything (including remote & local cursor, remote cursor-server, config, and all folder from %APPDATA%\Roaming\Cursor\User\workspaceStorage), [2] close cursor in windows, [3] pkill my user in remote server, then [4] installed a new cursor locally, new cursor remotely. Problem disappears for once, then appears again.
    • I created new repos, the bug doesn’t appear at beginning

I am not sure if I toggled some functionality button or something (I only installed a lot of extensions), or it is an existing bug. I tried 2.0 version it seems working well.

Steps to Reproduce

Due to (2), I am only able to find that “There is such an issue happens sometimes”, but I don’t actually know what is a robust way to reproduce it.

I did

  1. Clear everything (discussed above)
  2. Clone a repository, setup a workspace
  3. Work with cursor well (auto edits)
  4. After closing cursor (the remote cursor is not closed) then after like 1~1.5 hour, the problem appears again.

Cause I can’t reproduce it right now, I will try to upload the image if it appears again.

Expected Behavior

The agent is doing all the edits first, then asking me to review it.

Operating System

Windows 10/11

Current Cursor Version (Menu → About Cursor → Copy)

Version: 2.1.39 (user setup)
VSCode Version: 1.105.1
Commit: 60d42bed27e5775c43ec0428d8c653c49e58e260
Date: 2025-11-27T02:30:49.286Z
Electron: 37.7.0
Chromium: 138.0.7204.251
Node.js: 22.20.0
V8: 13.8.258.32-electron.0
OS: Windows_NT x64 10.0.26100

Does this stop you from using Cursor

No - Cursor works, but with this issue

1 Like
Approve file edits
3

Hey, thanks for the report. This might be a combo of the known worktrees bug + permission issues on the remote host.

To figure it out:

  • Are you using git worktrees?
  • Check permissions on the remote server: ls -la in the project folder and ls -la ~/.cursor-server (or ~/.vscode-server)
  • Check mount: mount | grep home - if you see noexec, that’s the issue
  • What extensions are installed? (Extensions panel)
  • Open Help → Toggle Developer Tools → Console and share the errors

Quick checks:

  • On remote host: chmod u+w -R ~/your-project (add write permissions)
  • If /home is mounted with noexec: remount or move the project to another directory
  • On remote server: rm -rf ~/.cursor-server ~/.vscode-server and reload SSH connection
  • Run cursor --disable-extensions - if the issue goes away, it’s an extension
  • Disable all protections: Cursor Settings → Agents → Auto-Run → External-File Protection and Dotfile Protection

If this doesn’t help, I’ll pass it to the team. Let me know what happened.

4

Hello! It seems the problem of external file protection. I turned off external file proection and it suddenly works. May I ask if there is a potential fix here or I have to turn it off until next update?

Thank you very much

5

It looks like this is an issue when the model chooses to use absolute paths when editing files instead of workspace relative paths. If you ask the model to use relative paths when editing files, things work as expected. I think that’s why disabling the External-File protection works.

Edit: This actually seems related to another bug where edits in the file aren’t working correctly. If the agent edits the file by shell command, the file changes, but then the changes seem to revert if you reload Cursor to see them.

6

Thanks! It seems the agent sometimes uses absolute paths or incorrectly determines their location, which triggers External‑File Protection.

Current options:

  • Leave protection on with External‑File Protection turned off while we figure it out.

If after restarting Cursor the changes disappear, that’s a related bug. Please send the Request ID and errors from Help → Toggle Developer Tools → Console.

1 Like
7

@deanrie same thing happened to me, I had added the folder of the project with the issue to another cursor instance before this happened.

So I have a cursor with the frontend opened another with the backend, I added my backend folder to the frontend cursor workspace so I could add some classes as context to the frontend cursor (which worked really good) but after that I had the issue of this post, finles werent created and if I was building a plan, the accept file wouldn’t prompt and it just hungs in there.

Hopes this helps to understand the issue!

thanks for the workaround it worked

8

This just started happening to me after updating.. worse part is that the button to allow edits DOES NOT APPEAR. The only way I knew it was asking was it sent a notification, and also, if i closed cursor and came back to that failed convo, then the allow button would appear. This is a nasty bug for sure.

9

I’m also getting this now.

I did start my most recent chat with pasting in an absolute path.

I tried stopping it and telling it to use relative paths for edit, no luck with that.

I’m in a workspace with multiple directories.

Version: 2.1.48 (user setup)
VSCode Version: 1.105.1
Commit: ce371ffbf5e240ca47f4b5f3f20efed084991120
Date: 2025-12-04T19:26:27.263Z
Electron: 37.7.0
Chromium: 138.0.7204.251
Node.js: 22.20.0
V8: 13.8.258.32-electron.0
OS: Windows_NT x64 10.0.26200

10

Could you share a UUID for the chat?

11

Hey all - trying a temporary fix here now. Can you let me know if resolved?

12

I am having the same problems since yesterday. Don’t know if it is update related. I am using GitHub tunnels, so my code is on a Linux Debian machine and my cursor on my Windows local machine. I tried the external toggle mentioned above, but that didn’t help. Yesterday deleted all on the windows side, setup the github tunnel again and then it worked. This morning it didn’t and I had same issues. And as an addition…commands like ‘npm run build’ can also not be executed anymore…

14

I can also confirm that I have this problem, and that it seems to be comorbid with cursor trying to use global paths and not having a good handle on the current workspace. I am running over remote-ssh if that matters.

Turning off file protection bypasses the issue, but I don’t love that as a solution

16

Chat ID: bdfb4337-395b-41cd-8314-499dc744b100

Logs: Logs Bug - Cursor · GitHub

@deanrie

1 Like
17

Hello, it has been 5 days, and in my scenario, I didn’t meet such problem after I update anymore, even if I open protection on externel files

18

Same issue here when I have external file protection on.
I am using git worktrees btw