Developer: Delete Old Chats claims 175 deleted but GC reports 0 deleted; chats reappear after reload (WSL2)

Support Bug Reports
1

Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

Cursor IDE

Describe the Bug

When I run Developer: Delete Old Chats… from the Command Palette and enter 1 (delete chats older than 1 day), the command appears to delete chats but they come back after reload.

Steps to Reproduce

  1. Open a project in Cursor IDE via WSL2 (Windows host → Remote - WSL).
  2. Have multiple chats in history, including many older than 1 day.
  3. Ctrl+Shift+P → Developer: Delete Old Chats…
  4. Enter 1.
  5. Wait for GC to finish (156s in my case).
  6. Note completion message below.
  7. Reload window when prompted.
  8. Open chat history: deleted chats are back.

Expected Behavior

  • Chats older than 1 day are permanently removed.
  • GC summary should be consistent (deleted count matches, live <= total).
  • state.vscdb should shrink after VACUUM.
  • Deleted chats should not reappear after reload.

Screenshots / Screen Recordings

Operating System

Windows 10/11

Version Information

Version: 3.13.25 (system setup)
VS Code Extension API: 1.128.0
Commit: 31e8d61c448c7472e371505838a0fe34083dad50
Date: 2026-07-28T06:17:45.069Z
Layout: IDE
Build Type: Stable
Release Track: Default
Electron: 40.10.3
Chromium: 144.0.7559.236
Node.js: 24.15.0
V8: 14.4.258.32-electron.0
xterm.js: 6.1.0-beta.256
OS: Windows_NT x64 10.0.26200

Additional Information

Exact completion message:

“Deleted 175 chat(s) older than 1 days in 1.7s. GC complete in 156.1s (GC: 138.1s, VACUUM: 17.9s): 168,516 total, 168,578 live, 0 deleted”

The first line says 175 chats were deleted, but the GC summary reports 0 deleted and live (168,578) is greater than total (168,516) (looks like a bug in the cleanup path).

state.vscdb is currently 2.20 GB and not shrinking after this operation.

Per-chat delete does work (three-dot menu → Delete removes a chat from history). Only the bulk Developer: Delete Old Chats… path seems broken for me.

I’ve attached a screen recording (GC scanning portion sped up 16x because it takes a long time in real use).

Does this stop you from using Cursor

No - Cursor works, but with this issue

5

Hey, thanks for the detailed report with steps, version, and the recording. That really helps.

There are actually two separate issues here:

  1. Bulk Developer: Delete Old Chats does not persist the deletion. The chats come back after reload, while per-chat delete via the three-dot menu works. This is not intended behavior and it is not caused by your setup. I shared it with the team and we are tracking it. For now, the workaround is to delete via the three-dot menu → Delete, since that deletion persists correctly.

  2. GC reports 0 deleted, live > total, and state.vscdb 2.2GB does not shrink. This is a separate known issue that we are tracking. I can’t share a timeline yet, but I will post an update in the thread when we have one.

If any chats still come back even after manual per-chat delete, let me know and we can dig into that separately.