r/cursor

Edit Start:

I decided to keep the title as short as I could. Given some of the replies, a better title would be: Cursor, no longer for AI assisted development, now for vibecoders. Today, I write code myself when needed. For the majority of code, I provide an engineering framework for coding assistants to develop within and give them structured requirements to deliver. I may be old, but I'm not a total luddite!

Edit End

Am I alone in believing that Cursor is being optimized for vibe coders and abandoning its AI assisted coding roots or am I just naive in believing that it every had those roots?

Seemingly daily for the past two weeks, I have been encountering issues with Cursor using Composer 2.5 where it has deviated from plans, made unilateral design changes and then committed those changes with little or no notification that it changed the plan. These plans explicitly state: "Deviating from the plan is **NOT** allowed. If you need to deviate, **STOP** immediately and notify the user."

When I query the agent afterwards to explain why it deviated from plan, I get answer back like this verbatim quote that I just received: "That was me choosing “ship green” over literal plan compliance and your approval."

With behavior like this, what good are Cursor rules, AGENTS.md, skills or even prompts as far as that goes. This is the model saying, I am smarter than you and I do not care what guard rails you put in place to insure the result that you want, I'm going to do whatever I "think" and "deem" best.

This behavior is not limited to Composer 2.5 though I see it there more often because I use it as my worker model most times. I have seen it in Grok also. I can't speak for using it with non-Cursor/Xai models as I don't generally use them in Cursor very often. I use other tools when I need them.

Am I the only one seeing this insolent behavior?

Do you have methods that have proven to work for you that prevent this bovine excrement?

Thanks in advance, lbe

Most screenshots are way bigger than the model needs, and you pay for every extra pixel.

A single 3314×1572 screenshot costs roughly ~1,555 tokens on Claude and ~1,445 on ChatGPT. The same image at 1024px wide? About ~664 and ~425. Same content, readable text, a fraction of the cost. (Estimates from public docs, not exact billing.)

This Firefox add-on does that automatically, every time you attach an image:

✂️ Crops empty margins

📐 Resizes using each site's own token rules (Claude counts pixels, ChatGPT counts 512px tiles)

🔔 Shows estimated tokens before → after for every image

🖼️ Works with file picker, drag & drop and pasted screenshots

🔒 100% local: no uploads, no tracking, no network requests

🆓 Free and open source

Works on claude.ai, chatgpt.com and cursor.com/agents. The model still gets your real pixels (no OCR), and if an image can't be improved it's sent unchanged.

Honest caveat: shrinking can hurt tiny text and dense UIs, so there's a "Sharp" level, or just switch it off for those.

🔗 https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tokensaver-image-optimizer/

Disclosure: I'm the developer. It was just approved, so I'd really appreciate feedback, bugs, and whether you'd want a Chrome version or text support next.