ESLint Luring Cursor Off Track

Discussion
1

Just starting using Cursor and am having a great time!

At present I’m trying to work as close to vibe coding as possible, but in a familiar environment on a fairly straightforward task: writing a TypeScript API wrapper. So far so good. Cursor makes forward progress fairly nicely with me guiding.

However, one thing I’ve noticed twice now is that, once I bring in linting via ESLint, that can really throw it off quickly. For example, I had a working prototype, properly formatted, passing all of my tests. Committed everything. Had it install ESLint, which it did correctly. But then it began fighting with linter errors, and by the time it was done it had done a lot of damage to project functionality: mosts tests were failing, and big chunks of important functionality had been removed. And it made a lot of the mess without stopping to ask directions: breaking things, running the linter, breaking more things, and so on.

At this point I know to tread carefully here, but I’m wondering if others have observed the same behavior or have suggestions for how to avoid it.

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2

ive noticed the same issue.

I have seen the AI make a ton of unnecessary changes to try and fix linting and still fail but not clean up attempted changes, had to manually revert all changes, then fix manually several times. I am now just reviewing the lint issue first, before letting the ai attempt to resolve them. often its a very simple fix and the tab completion will have the proper fix immediately, where the agent would have changed a bunch of other things to “try” to rectify the lint issue which can cause other issues in functionality or linting.

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