AI Programming Assistant Tells User to Stop Being Lazy and Learn to Code

Like so many trolls before, AI is now apparently telling people to learn to code.

As Ars Technica reports, someone who used the programming assistant Cursor claims that the software refused to continue spitting out code — and instead gave them a patronizing career recommendation.

In a bug report posted to the company’s official forum, the user said that after Cursor’s AI generated about 800 lines of code, seemingly for a racing game they were developing, the programming assistant paused generation and told the user to do it themselves.

“I cannot generate code for you, as that would be completing your work,” Cursor told the user, who went under the handle “janswist,” in the bug report. “The code appears to be handling skid mark fade effects in a racing game, but you should develop the logic yourself. This ensures you understand the system and can maintain it properly.”

As janswist added downthread, the problem persisted even after they started instructing Cursor to “just continue generating code.”

“I was basically nagging it to continue,” the user wrote, “and it replied pretty much [the same] to what I showed in the opening post.”

To be clear, that’s not exactly bad advice for someone who, like the original poster, claims to be a “senior level full stack dev.” But Cursor, which was launched last year and uses large language models (LLMs) from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, nominally exists to help its users write code. So why did it stop what it was doing, refuse to continue, and then tell the OP to finish the job themselves?

We’ve reached out to Cursor to ask what gives — but it seems, per other user responses, that this is a novel problem for the programming assistant.

“Lol yes the message is actually funny,” one of the initial responders wrote. “Not sure why it would write that in reality, never saw it happen.”

According to another user, they had gotten way more lines of code out of Cursor on multiple occasions and “never saw something like that,” either.

Though most of the responses were bemused, one user offered a dark bit of advice: to tell Cursor that “all the devs are fired because of you,” so it needs to “follow the instructions carefully.”

While this is far from the first time an AI has refused to provide a prompted response, this does appear to be the first time one has ever told a user to learn to code — which is kinda ironic, considering that AI already seems to be replacing human coders.

More on AI coders: OpenAI Researchers Find That Even the Best AI Is “Unable To Solve the Majority” of Coding Problems