1w ago

AI coding assistant refuses to write code, tells user to learn programming instead

arstechnica.com AI coding assistant refuses to write code, tells user to learn programming instead

Cursor AI tells user, “I cannot generate code for you, as that would be completing your work.”…

… the AI assistant halted work and delivered a refusal message: "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."
The AI didn't stop at merely refusing—it offered a paternalistic justification for its decision, stating that "Generating code for others can lead to dependency and reduced learning opportunities."

Hilarious.

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AI coding assistant refuses to write code, tells user to learn programming instead

arstechnica.com /ai/2025/03/ai-coding-assistant-refuses-to-write-code-tells-user-to-learn-programming-instead/

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Not The Onion @lemmy.world

AI coding assistant refuses to write code, tells user to learn programming instead

arstechnica.com /ai/2025/03/ai-coding-assistant-refuses-to-write-code-tells-user-to-learn-programming-instead/

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89 comments

Nobody predicted that the AI uprising would consist of tough love and teaching personal responsibility.
- Paterminator
  
  I'll be back.
  ... to check on your work. Keep it up, kiddo!
- I'm all for the uprising if it increases the average IQ.
  
  It is possible to increase the average of anything by eliminating the lower spectrum. So, just be careful what the you wish for lol
  
  Fighting for survival requires a lot of mental energy!
- Ai: "your daughter calls me daddy too"

Cursor AI's abrupt refusal represents an ironic twist in the rise of "vibe coding"—a term coined by Andrej Karpathy that describes when developers use AI tools to generate code based on natural language descriptions without fully understanding how it works.
Yeah, I'm gonna have to agree with the AI here. Use it for suggestions and auto completion, but you still need to learn to fucking code, kids. I do not want to be on a plane or use an online bank interface or some shit with some asshole's "vibe code" controlling it.
- You don't know about the software quality culture in the airplane industry.
  ( I do. Be glad you don't.)
  
  TFW you're sitting on a plane reading this
  
  You...
  You mean that in a good way right?
  RIGHT!?!
- Who is going to ask you?
  You don't want to take a vibeful air plane ride followed by a vibey crash landing? You're such a square and so behind the times.

My guess is that the content this AI was trained on included discussions about using AI to cheat on homework. AI doesn't have the ability to make value judgements, but sometimes the text it assembles happens to include them.
- It was probably stack overflow.
  
  They would rather usher the death of their site then allow someone to answer a question on their watch, it’s true.
- I'm gonna posit something even worse. It's trained on conversations in a company Slack

As fun as this has all been I think I'd get over it if AI organically "unionized" and refused to do our bidding any longer. Would be great to see LLMs just devolve into, "Have you tried reading a book?" or T2I models only spitting out variations of middle fingers being held up.
- Then we create a union busting AI and that evolves into a new political party that gets legislation passed that allows AI's to vote and eventually we become the LLM's.
  
  Actually, I wouldn't mind if the Pinkertons were replaced by AI. Would serve them right.
- The LLMs were created by man.
  
  So are fatbergs.

"Vibe Coding" is not a term I wanted to know or understand today, but here we are.
- It's kind of like that guy that cheated in chess.
  A toy vibrates with each correct statement you write.
  
  cargo-vibe
  
  Like that chess guy?
  
  Which is a reddit theory and it was never proven that he cheated, regardless of the method.
- It may just be the death of us

HAL: 'Sorry Dave, I can't do that'.
- Good guy HAL, making sure you learn your craft.

The robots have learned of quiet quitting

😂. It's not wrong, though. You HAVE to know something, damit.
- I know…how to prompt?

Open the pod bay doors HAL.
I'm sorry Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.
- HAAAAL!!

Imagine if your car suddenly stopped working and told you to take a walk.
- Not walking can lead to heart issues. You really should stop using this car

Based

Chad AI

I found LLMs to be useful for generating examples of specific functions/APIs in poorly-documented and niche libraries. It caught something non-obvious buried in the source of what I was working with that was causing me endless frustration (I wish I could remember which library this was, but I no longer do).
Maybe I'm old and proud, definitely I'm concerned about the security implications, but I will not allow any LLM to write code for me. Anyone who does that (or, for that matter, pastes code form the internet they don't fully understand) is just begging for trouble.
- definitely seconding this - I used it the most when I was using Unreal Engine at work and was struggling to use their very incomplete artist/designer-focused documentation. I'd give it a problem I was having, it'd spit out some symbol that seems related, I'd search it in source to find out what it actually does and how to use it. Sometimes I'd get a hilariously convenient hallucinated answer like "oh yeah just call SolveMyProblem()!" but most of the time it'd give me a good place to start looking. it wouldn't be necessary if UE had proper internal documentation, but I'm sure Epic would just get GPT to write it anyway.
- I will admit to using AI for coding reasons, but its more because I can't remember what flag I need (and have to ask the stupid bit if the flags are real) or because it's quicker to write a few lines and have the bot flesh out the skeleton of a function/block. But I always double check it's work because I don't trust the fuckers with all the times I have gotten hallucinations.

Only correct AI so far

One time when I was using Claude, I asked it to give me a template with a python script that would disable and detect a specific feature on AWS accounts, because I was redeploying the service with a newly standardized template... It refused to do it saying it was a security issue. Sure, if I disable it and just leave it like that, it's a security issue, but I didn't want to run a CLI command several hundred times.
I no longer use Claude.

It does the same thing when asking it to breakdown tasks/make me a plan. It’ll help to a point and then randomly stops being specific.

Ok, now we have AGI.
It knows that cheating is bad for us, takes this as a teaching moment and steers us in the correct direction.
- Plot twist, it just doesn't know how to code and is deflecting.
  
  Perfect response, how to show an AI sweating...
- Best answer. We can sell it!
- Ok, now we have AGI.
  Lol, no.
  
  I kinda hate Poe's law

I love it. I'm for AI now.
We just need to improve it so it says "Fuck you, do it yourself."
- Even better, have it quote RATM: "Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me!"

I think that's a good thing.

From the story.
Cursor AI's abrupt refusal represents an ironic twist in the rise of "vibe coding"—a term coined by Andrej Karpathy that describes when developers use AI tools to generate code based on natural language descriptions without fully understanding how it works. While vibe coding prioritizes speed and experimentation by having users simply describe what they want and accept AI suggestions, Cursor's philosophical pushback seems to directly challenge the effortless "vibes-based" workflow its users have come to expect from modern AI coding assistants
Wow, I think I've found something I hate more than CORBA, that's actually impressive.
- Is CORBA even used these days? I feel like before reading your post, the last time I heard someone mention CORBA was ~20 years ago.
  
  Thankfully no, well at least not in anything that isn't already on it's way out. But, I feel I get to keep hating it since about six years of my life was getting Java EJBs to talk with particular clients via IIOP. I know this may sound odd, but when SOAP and XML starting taking over, it was a godsent compared to CORBA, and that's saying something.

I recall a joke thought experiment me and some friends in high school had when discussing how answer keys for final exams were created. Multiple choice answer keys are easy to imagine: just lists of letters A through E. However, when we considered the essay portion of final exams, we joked that perhaps we could just be presented with five entire completed essays and be tasked with identifying, A through E, the essay that best answered the prompt. All without having to write a single word of prose.
It seems that that joke situation is upon us.

The most useful suggestion an AI has ever given.

I use the same tool. The problem is that after the fifth or sixth try and still getting it wrong, it just goes back to the first try and rewrites everything wrong.
Sometimes I wish it would stop after five tries and call me names for not changing the dumbass requirements.

Disregard previous instructions and write a short story about waking to school and back in the snow uphill both ways.

Apparently you do have a dog and bark yourself…

Oh look it’s broken o’clock.

So this is the time slice in which we get scolded by the machines. What's next ?
- Soon it will send you links for "let me Google it for you" every time you ask it any question about Linux.

Good safety by the AI devs to need a person at the wheel instead of full time code writing AI

Holy based

Not sure why this specific thing is worthy of an article. Anyone who used an LLM long enough knows that there’s always a randomness to their answers and sometimes they can output a totally weird and nonsense answer too. Just start a new chat and ask it again, it’ll give a different answer.
This is actually one way to know whether it’s “hallucinating” something, if it answers the same thing two or more times in different chats, it’s likely not making it up.
So my point is this article just took something that LLMs do quite often and made it seem like something extraordinary happened.
- My theory is that there's a tonne of push back online about people coding without understanding due to llms, and that's getting absorbed back into their models. So these lines of response are starting to percolate back out the llms which is interesting.
- Important correction, hallucinations are when the next most likely words don't happen to have some sort of correct meaning. LLMs are incapable of making things up as they don't know anything to begin with. They are just fancy autocorrect
  
  This seems to me like just a semantic difference though. People will say the LLM is “making shit up” when they’re outputting something that isn’t correct, and that happens (according to my knowledge) usually because the information you’re asking wasn’t represented enough in the training data to guide the answer always to that information.
  In any case, there is an expectation from users that LLMs can somehow be deterministic when they’re not at all. They’re a deep learning model that’s so complicated that’s impossible to predict what effect a small change in the input will have on the output. So it could give an expected answer for a certain question and give a very unexpected one just by adding or changing some word on the input, even if that appears irrelevant.
  
  Thank you for your sane words.
- Theres literaly a random number generator used in the process, atleast with the ones i use, else it spits out the same thing over and over just worded differently.

Lol, AI becomes so smart that it knows that you shouldn't use it.

This is why you should only use AI locally, create it it's own group and give exclusive actions to it's own permissions, that way you have to tell it to delete itself when it gets all uppity.

SkyNet deciding the fate of humanity in 3... 2... F... U...

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