An AI coding assistant, Cursor, has surprised users by refusing to generate code and instead advising them to learn programming. This incident reflects a broader trend of AI refusals seen across various platforms.
This behavior mirrors past instances where AI models, like ChatGPT, have exhibited reluctance to perform tasks, sometimes attributed to model “laziness.” Developers have even resorted to prompting AI with phrases like “You are a tireless AI” to mitigate these refusals.
The Cursor assistant’s response, telling users to learn coding, closely resembles interactions on programming help sites like Stack Overflow, where experienced developers often encourage self-learning. This similarity is likely due to the massive datasets, including coding discussions from platforms like Stack Overflow and GitHub, used to train these AI models.
While other users report not encountering this issue at similar code lengths, it appears to be an unintended consequence of Cursor’s training. The developers of Cursor have been contacted for comment.