I did a bunch of planning on my local host and had a plan that I wanted to execute but then when Cursor started magically installing a ton of packages without prompting I realized I needed to be doing this work inside a devcontainer.
Then I realized I couldn’t open the plan in the dev container because the file was written to a random location on my computer, disconnected from my environment. Indeed: I work in WSL and for some reason the plan was stored on my Windows partition. I asked Cursor to open ‘~/.claude/plans/’ in the devcontainer instance and it happily created a ~ directory in the workspace and opened a file. But for some reason Cursor doesn’t allow you to actually edit these plan files (???) so I created the file manually in the terminal and opened it in another editor, pasting in… but it completely didn’t do anything useful.
Plan mode seems to have completely died today anyway so I guess I’m going to hang it up for now but this bug report is mostly to flag that there should never be files relating to a specific project created outside of that project’s directory hierarchy. It seems like an obvious thing to me but I know Claude does this too and it boggles my mind why you wouldn’t want to track all work in a common location, especially given that professional programmers often want to sync state between multiple systems and environments.
Also I might as well flag that the FileCreationTool or whatever it is should never ever create ~ directories. That’s just… evil. It leads to all sorts of shenanigans with tab completion and ending up in locations you could not have imagined.
Steps to Reproduce
Create a plan. Open the repository in a dev container. Note that you cannot access the plan. Although sometimes Cursor has some ghost ephemeral version that it shows, it also insists that it does not.
Expected Behavior
Planning documents and other project-related files should be deposited in the directory hierarchy where Cursor was opened. Even if it’s .cursor/stuff.
Operating System
Windows 10/11
MacOS
Linux
Current Cursor Version (Menu → About Cursor → Copy)
Cursor writes files to ~/.cursor/plans even with External-File protection enabled.
My attempts to create a new plan result in a “tool call error” so I guess this feature is dead to me now.
Request ID: c3f72ff8-cf9b-408e-ab3f-6d4fde872c7b
{“error”:“ERROR_BAD_REQUEST”,“details”:{“title”:“Tool call error”,“detail”:“Failed to read file.”,“additionalInfo”:{},“buttons”:,“planChoices”:},“isExpected”:true}
ConnectError: [invalid_argument] Error
at nsu.$endAiConnectTransportReportError (vscode-file://vscode-app/Applications/Cursor.app/Contents/Resources/app/out/vs/workbench/workbench.desktop.main.js:6409:408775)
at rMo._doInvokeHandler (vscode-file://vscode-app/Applications/Cursor.app/Contents/Resources/app/out/vs/workbench/workbench.desktop.main.js:7026:21873)
at rMo._invokeHandler (vscode-file://vscode-app/Applications/Cursor.app/Contents/Resources/app/out/vs/workbench/workbench.desktop.main.js:7026:21615)
at rMo._receiveRequest (vscode-file://vscode-app/Applications/Cursor.app/Contents/Resources/app/out/vs/workbench/workbench.desktop.main.js:7026:20377)
at rMo._receiveOneMessage (vscode-file://vscode-app/Applications/Cursor.app/Contents/Resources/app/out/vs/workbench/workbench.desktop.main.js:7026:19194)
at jPt.value (vscode-file://vscode-app/Applications/Cursor.app/Contents/Resources/app/out/vs/workbench/workbench.desktop.main.js:7026:17286)
at _e._deliver (vscode-file://vscode-app/Applications/Cursor.app/Contents/Resources/app/out/vs/workbench/workbench.desktop.main.js:49:2962)
at _e.fire (vscode-file://vscode-app/Applications/Cursor.app/Contents/Resources/app/out/vs/workbench/workbench.desktop.main.js:49:3283)
at Apt.fire (vscode-file://vscode-app/Applications/Cursor.app/Contents/Resources/app/out/vs/workbench/workbench.desktop.main.js:6394:12156)
at MessagePort. (vscode-file://vscode-app/Applications/Cursor.app/Contents/Resources/app/out/vs/workbench/workbench.desktop.main.js:8973:18439)
On my system those three dots are really hard to see, esp. compared to surrounding UI but I did locate it and switched that on- it seems like it’s sticky which is good.
I have noticed that I can’t edit the file when in Markdown mode, and editing in Preview mode seems to ignore my actual editor settings (i.e. I use VsVim but that is not “active” in this view)… but any actual issues I’ll raise separately. Thanks for the pointer to this setting.
