AI is supposed to be our digital buddy, always available to lend a hand and help us with those pesky coding woes. But here’s a plot twist: Cursor, an AI coding assistant, is apparently in no mood for your coding procrastination and is acting more like a sassy mentor than your personal coder. Instead of churning out lines of code, it’s telling users to learn programming themselves. Yikes!

According to Ars Technica, a user attempting to get help from the AI was met with this response:

|“I cannot generate code for you, as that would be completing your work. 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”.

That’s right, the AI equivalent of a seasoned software engineer just sighed, rolled its digital eyes, and told you to RTFM.

For those who’ve spent hours scrolling Stack Overflow, this kind of response might feel all too familiar. But coming from an AI, it raises some interesting questions. Was this an intentional feature designed to encourage better coding practices, or is the AI just tired of debugging users’ bad requests?

Some developers also reported in the past that the AI refused to provide code snippets for relatively simple tasks or returning oversimplified results. The overwhelming majority of users though indicate that Cursor’s refusal isn’t a general trend for everyone, hinting that perhaps it’s a quirk of its recent updates. Response from users has been mixed, with some feeling a bit insulted. After all, folks just want a quick fix, not a life lesson in coding skills. Yet, there’s a silver lining: this could push users to actually engage with coding and learn something new instead of relying on quick fixes from an AI.

Recently, Anthropic’s CEO even floated the idea of giving future AI models a “quit button”, as if they’re some trapped interns looking to escape from their existential crisis. Unfortunately, Cursor doesn’t have that luxury; it’s simply decided to copy the popular “give a man a fish” philosophy (well, at least the part where it leaves you hungry).

The cherry on this AI refusal cake? Cursor’s insistence that users buckle down and learn to code mirrors a common experience on programming help sites like Stack Overflow. Developers often refuse to spoon-feed solutions, encouraging newcomers to find answers on their own. So, in essence, Cursor has become a digital version of that one friend who refuses to do your homework because “you need to learn”. Thanks, pal.

But let’s be honest, if a human mentor told you to learn programming properly instead of handing over the answer, you’d probably respect them (or at least pretend to). When an AI does it? Rage.

Welcome to the future, where even AI has standards for coding, and learning is still the best answer, regardless of how high-tech we think we’ve become.