Dev Containers broken

Ideas Feedback
1

Hi all.

I want to share my experience in case others are in a similar situation, and to ask directly: has anyone actually gotten a response from Cursor support?

■ The Bug

I’ve been completely unable to use Dev Containers in Cursor. The issues are well-documented in these threads, with reports going back nearly six months:

I tried everything: “Reopen in container,” “Reload window,” reinstalling Cursor Server. Nothing works. For those of us on thin-client environments, Dev Containers aren’t optional — they’re the entire workflow.

■ The Support Experience

Four days ago, I contacted Cursor support regarding this issue and received a ticket number, but have not heard back since. No reply, no acknowledgment, no timeline.

I have a simple question for the Cursor team: what is your actual support response time commitment?

■ A Broader Frustration

I’ll be honest: this situation has made me reconsider Cursor altogether.

Every update seems to bring pointless UI shuffling — settings move, layouts shift, and at some point the primary sidebar ended up horizontal by default. This is a VSCode fork. Developers know where things should be. Cursor keeps rearranging the furniture as if it needs to establish its own identity, and it comes at the cost of a stable, predictable working environment. Meanwhile, fundamental functionality like Dev Container support quietly breaks and stays broken. The forum workarounds — “try this, it might happen less often” — are not fixes.

I’m not here for vibe coding. I’m here to get work done. And every time Cursor breaks mid-flow, I lose not just minutes but momentum — the kind that’s hard to get back when you’re deep in a problem.

VSCode doesn’t do this. I did briefly try Antigravity, but it doesn’t support Dev Containers over SSH, so I only used it a handful of times. That said, the chat UI felt notably more polished than Cursor’s. I’d like to stay with Cursor, but not if the basics can’t be trusted.

If anyone from the Cursor team is reading this: please explain what your support response time commitment actually is.

3

Hey, sorry for the delay getting back to you from support. This really isn’t the experience we want to provide.

About Dev Containers: this is a known issue with the extension, specifically the error Failed to read .gitconfig: The "path" argument must be of type string. Received undefined. The team is aware, but there’s no ETA for a fix yet.

There’s a workaround that helps some users: make sure .gitconfig exists on the remote host (not inside the container) and that $HOME is set correctly:

echo $HOME
ls -la ~/.gitconfig
# If the file doesn’t exist:
git config --global user.name "Your Name"
git config --global user.email "[email protected]"

To be honest, this doesn’t help everyone since the root cause is in the extension itself. More details and discussion here:

A couple questions so I can better understand your setup:

  • Are you using Dev Containers over SSH remote, or locally?
  • What Cursor version and OS are you on?

Let me know if the workaround doesn’t help.

4

Hi,

Thank you for following up, and I appreciate the acknowledgment.

To answer your questions:

  • Dev Containers over SSH remote, from Windows
  • Environment details below
Devcontainer Extension: 1.0.32
Cursor Version: 3.0.13 (user setup)
VSCode Version: 1.105.1
Commit: 48a15759f53cd5fc9b5c20936ad7d79847d914b0
Date: 2026-04-07T03:05:17.114Z
OS: Windows_NT x64 10.0.22631

I’ll be honest — I don’t expect this information to move things forward, and here is why.

Every suggestion in this thread, every workaround Claude could generate, including the .gitconfig fix you mentioned, I have already tried. None of it resolved the issue.

If you can reproduce it yourself, you probably already have everything you need. The setup is straightforward: install Cursor on Windows or Mac, switch to the Editor layout, use “Connect Current Window to Host” to SSH into a Linux machine with Docker installed, then try to attach to a running container. That should reproduce it immediately. I had the same issue on my personal Mac as well, going back to last year, before I uninstalled Cursor there.

One thing I need to ask: was your response generated by an AI? If so, please do not reply further and escalate this to a human who can make a real decision.

The reason I ask is that after six months of an unresolved known issue, being asked “Are you using Dev Containers over SSH remote, or locally?” and “What Cursor version and OS are you on?” feels like exactly the kind of exchange an automated system generates. These are not questions that move anything forward. The root cause is already known. My environment is not the problem.

Going through another round of environment checks is not something I am willing to do. What I need is a clear statement: when will this be fixed, and what version will it land in. If that information is not available, then the conversation about compensation for the time this has been broken needs to happen instead.

6

Update: Support came through.

After several exchanges, they converted the remaining balance of my annual subscription into account credit, with the option to resubscribe once the bug is fixed.

It took a while, so if you are in the same situation it is worth reaching out — just be prepared for some back and forth.

Looking forward to the fix.