Your GPT diagnosis is on the right track. Cursor does run git status and ripgrep scans on the remote workspace for source control and file indexing. On large directories over NFS, these can take a long time and block the remote extension host, which causes the agent timeout. This is something we’ve seen before and our team is actively working on improving.
To answer your question directly: disabling git won’t break the coding agents. They don’t depend on the Git extension for file edits or terminal commands. But you don’t need to disable it entirely - try these more targeted options first:
1. Open a narrower workspace. If you’re opening your entire HPC home directory, open just the specific project folder you’re working in. This is the single biggest improvement for NFS setups.
2. Create a .cursorignore file in your workspace root to exclude large directories from indexing:
large-data-dir/
build/
.cache/
node_modules/
3. Reduce file watching and git scanning. Add these to your Cursor settings (JSON):
{
"files.watcherExclude": {
"**/.git/objects/**": true,
"**/node_modules/**": true,
"**/build/**": true
},
"git.autoRepositoryDetection": false
}
4. Last resort — set "git.enabled": false. The agents will still work fine; you’d just lose the Git status indicators and diff views in the sidebar.
You may also find this related thread helpful, where another SSH user hit the same timeout.