Cursor freezes after ~5 turns in a new window

Support Bug Reports
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1

Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

Cursor IDE

Describe the Bug

Cursor is unbearably laggy right now — what are you doing?

I open a new window, and with Composer 2 I can only get through about 5 turns of conversation before it starts freezing — completely frozen. If it’s going to freeze, at least stop; instead it just keeps spinning forever.

GPT 5.5 does the same thing.

Meanwhile, Claude Code keeps finishing long-running tasks without issue, but Cursor locks up after a ridiculous 5 turns. Are we back in the Stone Age?

And don’t blame “long context.” Sometimes it freezes on a single turn — that’s ridiculous. My project isn’t even that large. What are you doing???

For an AI coding product, the core value doesn’t come from — or doesn’t only come from — polished interaction design. What we need is a smooth, uninterrupted workflow. Great UX alone isn’t enough; you could hire Notion’s head of product and it still wouldn’t fix this!!!

Steps to Reproduce

Cursor is unbearably laggy right now — what are you doing?

I open a new window, and with Composer 2 I can only get through about 5 turns of conversation before it starts freezing — completely frozen. If it’s going to freeze, at least stop; instead it just keeps spinning forever.

GPT 5.5 does the same thing.

Meanwhile, Claude Code keeps finishing long-running tasks without issue, but Cursor locks up after a ridiculous 5 turns. Are we back in the Stone Age? And don’t blame “long context.” Sometimes it freezes on a single turn — that’s ridiculous. My project isn’t even that large. What are you doing???

Operating System

MacOS

Version Information

Version: 3.6.21
VS Code Extension API: 1.105.1
Commit: e7a7e93f4d75f8272503ecf33cedbaae10114a10
Date: 2026-05-28T21:45:36.072Z
Layout: editor
Build Type: Stable
Release Track: Default
Electron: 39.8.1
Chromium: 142.0.7444.265
Node.js: 22.22.1
V8: 14.2.231.22-electron.0
xterm.js: 6.1.0-beta.220
OS: Darwin arm64 25.2.0

Does this stop you from using Cursor

Yes - Cursor is unusable

3

Please don’t attribute this to long-context issues. I sometimes freeze on a single conversation turn, which is absurd. My codebase isn’t particularly large either. What is going on on your end???

7

Request ID: bc65d13e-8747-4e87-9705-3920a2de809a — it froze completely after just one turn…

8

I’ve been hitting this issue all this week too, and Cursor has become essentially unusable for me. It continuously crashes when trying to apply a couple of steps’ worth of edits to a simple Raycast extension. It’s clear that this issue has been present for a while, judging by the forum history, and I’ll be cancelling my subscription next time my billing cycle resets if it’s not resolved. The product literally isn’t functioning for me.

9

But if I cancel/interrupt and start a new session, it sometimes works fine again…

10

Yes — this awful experience makes me wonder: does Cursor not realize how fierce the competition is right now? Codex and Claude Code are shipping updates constantly…

12

Yes — and to be fair, the Notion product hire has done some interaction design well: progressive disclosure, information layout, styling, and the like. But we’re in the AI era — please stop building with a mobile-era product mindset. It looks fashionable, but this design philosophy is already way out of date for what we actually need from an AI coding product.

15

Hey, thanks for the report and for the Request ID, it really helps. Since the freeze happens both in a single run and regardless of the model (Composer 2, GPT 5.5), this points to a client renderer freeze, not an issue with the model or the context. This is a known issue and we’re tracking it.

A couple things to check right now:

  1. You’re on version 3.6.21 (May 28). Since then we’ve shipped a few renderer performance improvements. Please update to the latest (Cursor Settings or reinstall from cursor.com/download) and see if the behavior changes.
  2. Next time you hit the freeze, open Cmd+Shift+P > Developer: Open Process Explorer and check which process is pegged on CPU (likely renderer/window). If you can catch it, a screenshot here would help.

The workaround you found (interrupt + new session) also matches this. The old session with heavy rendering gets stuck, and the new one starts clean.

Let me know after you update. If it still freezes on the latest, tell me and we’ll keep digging.