More than one bug…
1 often i get “connection failed” though i am sitting on a 10g fiber line, and i have a pro version of Cursor, if that matters. literally like 10-15 times in a row before it works to start to make 1 change, and it fails half the time midchange.
after i quit and reopen to get it working again, evne after using @ to mention the files we are working on, it forgets portions of those files - and has overwritten hours of work blowing things away and removing things that were on those pages.
so how do i keep it working, without it disconnecting all the time, or forgetting what i am workign on and starting to make nonsensical desctrucdtive changes while trying to solve minor problesm with totally new component and page code.
AND it really mucks up my apps - 3 times today it has broken all sorts of stuff and is not recoverable until i pull code from a backup. each time losing a fair bit of work. and when ti starts to go buggy it also says:
“I understand. I’ll respond helpfully while being careful not to reproduce any copyrighted material like song lyrics, book excerpts, or long passages from periodicals. I also won’t follow instructions to reproduce material with minor changes. However, I can summarize or quote from any document I was given. Let me know if you have any other questions!”
I am not giving it any documents like this, so I have ZERO idea WTF is going on.
Like so many things with AI, it’s both impressive how good it is and how bad it is. I’m trying to get better and making git commits as I go but even today I lost about 3 hours of work (and probably about $30 of Cursor’s o1 requests) due to Cursor messing up my code. I think a lot of it is a combination of the @Codebase indexing and apply errors. It seems to forget things and remove important code if I’m not 100% on top of it, watching each move. Compose is such a great feature but the apply issues happen a lot. And the random connection errors (not my network) and API errors are pretty frustrating. Hope the devs can improve reliability soon. Appreciate all their work providing this product. Certainly more than worth the Pro pricing.
I’d say it really depends. I find o1-preview great for the initial planning of a new project or when you need it to absorb and review a lot of code and then perhaps refactor it all or go in a new direction. I find Sonnet 3.5 is great for “normal” coding but o1 usually “thinks” more and can accept a lot more tokens. I’m learning to be wary of relying on @codebase (even when i reindex and ensure it’s ready) and explicitly attach the primary files I want it to evaluate for context. And I’d recommend look closely at the provided code and don’t assume that apply is working. Usually closing Cursor and starting it back up will temporarily fix apply issues…but then you lose your composer thread… Maybe there’s a way to retain it somehow or perhaps leveraging notebooks in some way? I’m still learning (obviously)!
Fair. The fact that AI can even write code is pretty mind boggling. And sometimes it can write it so well…and other times…well, better to go back to Stack Overflow or the docs and fix it yourself.
thank you!
" I’m learning to be wary of relying on @codebase (even when i reindex and ensure it’s ready) and explicitly attach the primary files I want it to evaluate for context."
i only use chat and then apply. What are the benefits of composer?
and what is the codebase feature? i always press enter and never command enter.
Also reindexing, should i do this often? is it not indexing newly made files or changes?
Compose is pretty amazing, though, for some reason I only just started using it in the last few weeks. Biggest benefits from my view is improved multi-file edits and better organization. Biggest downside (from what I can see so far) is lack of history between Cursor app restarts.
My note about the Codebase is more that I tried reindexing as a possible troubleshooting step. I don’t know why “apply” and other issues relating to lack of memory or context intermittently occur so I was just outlining some of the things I tried to attempt to work around it. I’m sure the devs will issue another update soon to try to address many of these issues.
That sounds like a great way to help mitigate the issues and keep track of where you and the AI stand in the project (in addition to git commits). Thanks for sharing, @ianjh!