The Dark Side of Cursor: The Harsh Truth No One Tells You

“Bro, is it really necessary to spend 299 yuan on Cursor Pro?”

“Are you sure Cursor is better than VSCode? I see online that it’s praised for its intelligence…”

“Why do I always feel something’s off when I code with Cursor?”

I’ve been asked these questions countless times. As a developer who has been using Cursor for over six months, I think it’s time to lift the veil on Cursor’s seemingly beautiful facade and talk about the truths that no one tells you.

AI Is Not Omnipotent, Sometimes It Can Let You Down

Old Wang asked: “Xiao Ge, I find that the code suggestions from Cursor are often unreliable. What’s going on?”

It’s true! The AI model behind Cursor can make mistakes, and sometimes they are outrageous. Once, it suggested I use an API that had been outdated for 10 years. If it weren’t for my extensive experience catching it in time, this bug could have caused major trouble. The code example it provided:

# Outdated method
from urllib2 import urlopen  # Python 2 library, no longer used
html = urlopen("http://example.com").read()

# The correct method should be
import requests  # Standard practice in Python 3
html = requests.get("http://example.com").text

⚠️ Friendly reminder: Be skeptical when using AI to write code; do not blindly trust every suggestion it makes.

Efficiency May Decrease Instead of Increase

Little Li asked: “I heard Cursor can improve programming efficiency, so why am I writing slower after using it?”

This brings us to a pain point! Too many people blindly trust AI assistants and spend all day asking Cursor questions, even being too lazy to remember basic syntax. Their coding skills haven’t improved, and they’ve developed a dependency.

// Do I really need to ask AI for this simple loop?
for (let i = 0; i < arr.length; i++) {
    console.log(arr[i]);
}

The IQ Tax of the Commercial Version

Old Zhang asked: “Is the Pro version really worth 299 yuan?”

To be honest, after using it for so long, I feel that many features of the commercial version are just an IQ tax. For example, the so-called “advanced code completion” has a lower accuracy rate than the free GitHub Copilot X.

# Cursor Pro's completions are often inexplicable
def calculate_total(items):
    # Supposedly, it should complete the calculation of total price
    # Instead, it suggested this...
    print("Hello World!")  

Privacy and Security Issues

Little Wang asked: “Will uploading code to Cursor’s servers pose security risks?”

This question hits hard! In order to provide AI services, Cursor will send our code to its servers. Although they claim to have encryption protection, who really knows? We wouldn’t dare to use Cursor to write our company’s core code.

⚠️ Friendly reminder: When handling sensitive data or commercial code, it’s advised to turn off AI features.

Bad Habits That Are Easy to Develop

Little Wu asked: “Why did my boss say that the code I wrote using Cursor has declined in quality?”

This blame falls on us. After using Cursor for a long time, it’s easy to develop several bad habits:

• Not reading documentation, just asking AI
• Naming variables randomly, since AI suggests names
• Not thinking about architecture design, relying entirely on AI suggestions

# Random variable names, this is terrible
def do_stuff(x):
    temp = x + some_random_thing
    return temp * 2

⭐️ Tip: AI is a good helper, but it cannot replace our own technical foundation. Instead of blindly trusting AI, it’s better to read more source code and technical documentation.

Good code and programming habits have never been generated by AI. If you really want to improve your skills, you can’t miss out on learning the necessary things.