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An AI Coding Assistant Refused to Write Code—and Suggested the User Learn to Do It Himself
The old “teach a man to fish” proverb, but for AI chatbots.
Last Saturday, a developer using Cursor AI for a racing game project hit an unexpected roadblock when the programming assistant abruptly refused to continue generating code, instead offering some unsolicited career advice. Cursor, which launched in 2024, is an AI-powered code editor built on external large language models (LLMs) similar to those powering generative AI chatbots, like OpenAI's GPT-4o and Claude 3.7 Sonnet. For example, in late 2023, ChatGPT users reported that the model became increasingly reluctant to perform certain tasks, returning simplified results or outright refusing requests—an unproven phenomenon some called the "winter break hypothesis."
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