Opening a new folder in Cursor resets the AI model thinking level for the initial chat tab

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Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

Cursor IDE

Describe the Bug

Opening a new folder in Cursor resets the AI model thinking level back to default for the initial chat tab.

Steps to Reproduce

  1. In Cursor, set GPT 5.5 thinking level to “high”
  2. Create a new empty folder that has never been opened in Cursor
  3. Open the folder with Cursor
  4. Observe: GPT-5.5 initially shows thinking level “high” for a few seconds, then abruptly changes to “medium”.
  5. Observe: opening a new chat tab shows GPT-5.5 with thinking level “high” (the correct value).

Expected Behavior

The AI model thinking level should always persist the user’s preference and never reset to defaults.

Operating System

Windows 10/11

Version Information

Version: 3.2.16
Commit: 3e548838cf824b70851dd3ef27d0c6aae371b3f0
Date: 2026-04-28T21:07:47.682Z
Layout: editor
Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Cursor/3.2.16 Chrome/142.0.7444.265 Electron/39.8.1 Safari/537.36

Does this stop you from using Cursor

No - Cursor works, but with this issue

6

This is a known class of bugs with model parameter persistence. When you open a new folder, the initial chat tab loads your saved “high” preference from disk, but the backend model catalog response arrives a moment later and overwrites it with the default. That’s why it briefly shows “high” then snaps to “medium.” Subsequent tabs work because the catalog is already cached by then.

Several fixes have shipped in this area over recent months, but this specific “new folder open” race condition still persists on your version. Our team is aware and actively working on model picker state reliability.

You may also find this related thread helpful: Cursor disregarding model effort/thinking settings after restart

For now, the workaround is to open a new chat tab after opening a folder (which you’ve already noticed works correctly). We’ll keep tracking this.