New chat opens with large block of repetitive / nonsensical prefilled text

[aplatti (Adam Platti)]

Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

Cursor IDE

Describe the Bug

When starting a new chat, the chat input (or composer) is not empty. It is automatically filled with a long, repetitive passage that begins with “Squish” and introduces “John” as a UC student, with the same sentence repeated many times, followed by many “Tap” tokens and “Thank you.” This appears without the user typing or pasting that content. It suggests stray input injection, a bad default template, or a sync/clipboard/automation bug rather than intentional behavior.

Steps to Reproduce

1. Open Cursor.
2. Open the Chat panel (or wherever new chats are created).
3. Click the control to start a new chat (e.g. “New Chat” or equivalent).
4. Observe the message/composer area before typing anything.

Expected Behavior

A new chat should open with an empty input (or only the normal placeholder/hint), with no pre-populated user message or repeated boilerplate text.

Screenshots / Screen Recordings

Operating System

MacOS

Version Information

Cursor 2.6.21 (Stable, Default release track)
VS Code base: 1.105.1
Commit: fea2f546c979a0a4ad1deab23552a43568807590
Built: 2026-03-21T22:09:10.098Z
Electron: 39.8.1
Chromium: 142.0.7444.265
Node.js: 22.22.1
V8: 14.2.231.22-electron.0
macOS (Darwin 24.6.0, arm64)

For AI issues: which model did you use?

Not applicable / unknown (issue occurs on new chat before a model response)

Does this stop you from using Cursor

No - Cursor works, but with this issue

[deanrie]

Hey, thanks for the detailed report. This is a known issue related to voice dictation. The Whisper transcription model can sometimes hallucinate text from silence or background noise, and that text ends up in the chat input. The pattern with repeated “Tap”, “Thank you”, and random phrases is a typical sign of that.

This isn’t another user’s data and it isn’t anything malicious. It’s just the STT model picking up ambient noise and generating phantom text.

Voice input was likely turned on by accident, or left on from a previous session, especially since you’re working over SSH remote. Your local mic could’ve picked up background sounds.

As a workaround, make sure voice input is off when you’re not using it. Just clear the input box and keep going.

I’ve passed this to the team. It’s already on our radar, and your report helps us prioritize it. A similar issue was discussed here: WEIRD chat message