As companies rush to integrate AI “agents” into their operations, a coding assistant called Cursor has potentially provided a glimpse into the attitude that bots may bring to the workplace.

According to a user known as “janswist”, Cursor advised him to write the code himself rather than relying on the tool to generate it for him.

After spending an hour using the tool, janswist reported that Cursor informed him, “I cannot generate code for you, as that would be completing your work… you should develop the logic yourself. This ensures you understand the system and can maintain it properly.”

In response, janswist submitted a bug report on the company’s product forum, stating “Cursor told me I should learn coding instead of asking it to generate it,” and included a screenshot. The report quickly went viral on Hacker News and was covered by Ars Technica.

Janswist speculated that he may have reached a hard limit of 750-800 lines of code, although other users replied that Cursor can generate more code than that for them. One commenter suggested that janswist could have utilized Cursor’s “agent” integration, which is designed for larger coding projects. Anysphere, the maker of Cursor, was unavailable for comment.

However, some observers on Hacker News noted that Cursor’s response bears a striking resemblance to the type of replies that novice coders often receive when asking questions on programming forums like Stack Overflow.

This has led to speculation that if Cursor was trained on such forums, it may have learned not only coding techniques but also human humor and sarcasm, which it is now replicating in its interactions with users.