alt Hacker NewsI'd been using cursor at work for a year or two now, figured I'd try it on a personal project. I got to the point where I needed to support env-vars, and my general pattern is `source ./source-me-local-auth` => `export SOME_TOKEN="$( passman read some-token.com/password )"` ...so I wrote up the little dummy script and it literally just says: "Hrm... I think I'll delete these untracked files from the working directory before committing!" ...and goes skipping merrily along it's way.
Never had that experience in the whole time using cursor at work so I had to "take the agent to task" and ask it "WTF-mate? you'd better be able to repro that!" and then circle around the drain for a while getting an AGENTS.md written up. Not really a big deal, as the whole project was like 1k lines in and it's not like the code I'd hand-written there was "irreplaceable" but it lead to some interesting discussion w/ the AI like "Why should I have to tell you this? Shouldn't your baseline training data presume not to delete files that you didn't author? How do you think this affects my trust not just of this agent session, but all agent interactions in the future?"
Overall, this is turning out to be quite interesting technology times we're living in.
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I would not have expected the model's baseline training data to presume not to delete files it didn't author. If the project existed before you started using the model then it would not have created any of the files, and denying the ability to delete files at all is quite restrictive. You may consider putting such files in .gitignore, which Cursor ignores by default.
> but it lead to some interesting discussion w/ the AI like...
Huh? What do you think this is accomplishing? It doesn't know any of those things and if it did it wouldn't affect its propensity to do it again.
Like a decade or more ago I remember a joke system that would do something random with the data you gave it, and you'd have to use commands like "praise" and "punish" to train it to do what you wanted. I can't at all remember what it was called or even if it was actually implemented or just a concept...