DevContainers worked 100% for 2024 and almost all of 2025.
Then AnySphere published a custom, buggy, badly written ‘alternative’ extension and tricked people into installing it. It’s like DevCotnainers, but … broken in multiple ways.
The original devcotnainers is now missing from the cursor marketplace.
What’s the workaround? We can’t “use the agent” since the cursor agent CREATES THE WRONG CONTAINER half the time (it guesses, and makes stupid guesses, wasting huge amounts of time … when the IDE itself already has the feature built-in and working 100% reliably).
Steps to Reproduce
Use cursor. Attempt “open folder in devcontainer”. Microsoft’s own official definition of this feature is that it MUST create a devcontainer automtically - Cursor’s custom implemenation fails to uphold the contrtact.
Expected Behavior
Work exactly as it did for the last 2 years.
Operating System
Windows 10/11
Current Cursor Version (Menu → About Cursor → Copy)
… and as far as I can tell: Cursor’s custom implementation of devcontainers is currently (december 2025) incompatible with the devcontainer spec / microsoft’s reference implementation. Analysis of the logs suggest Cursor tries to init a diffrent docker container than MS / Vscode would, and that Cursor requires a custom devcontainer.json - suggesting its even more important that cursor reinstates the working ‘autogenerate the devctonainer file’ that previously worked for 2 years.
The previous response ‘let the agent do it’ is insulting and stupid: the agent will not run while these errors are in progress.
Unfortunately, this is a known limitation of the Anysphere DevContainers extension - it doesn’t provide a wizard to select prebuilt templates like the original Microsoft extension does.
For now, the only options are:
Manually create the .devcontainer/devcontainer.json with the needed configuration
Or temporarily use VS Code with the Microsoft extension for setup, then switch back to Cursor
I’ll pass on to the team that this is critical for many users’ workflow - auto-generation of devcontainer.json needs to come back.
Re: using the agent to set up the dev container: does this work if you open Cursor outside of the devcontainer (i.e. open the folder locally?). The agent should be able to work on the devcontainer files in that environment.