pillsburycat

> Is this the "but privacy!111" stance

Mostly, yes. But let's unpack this a little: these companies often claim a massive amount of data is being collected "to improve our products" and "to make the world a better place." In reality, the data is more often used to deanonymize the user and build a precise profile of them. It is subsequently sold to third-party companies who specialize in this sort of business and are equipped to extract the most value possible from the data. In the most benign form, this is done by targeting the user with personalized ads.

Nowadays, this data-mining process is almost completely automated, and there are ways to legally cover your ass by stripping the datasets of too-directly identifiable information. If you audit these databases, your name, phone number, email, and what you like having for dinner are probably not going to appear together in a single row. However, a direct mapping is trivial to recover by correlation and inference. The profile that can be built from this data is usually very precise.

People who say "muh privacy!!111" tend to find this whole process fundamentally icky. I personally don't like opening an IDE like Cursor and feeling like I'm stepping into some KGB-era hotel room with microphones in the walls and a two-way mirror in the bathroom.

Of course, it is completely up to you to disagree and continue uploading your codebase, prompts, and session data to Cursor's servers and give Cursor permission to inspect this data and send it to third parties at their leisure. I am merely giving my advice, which I admit is very biased.

Personally, what I find the most reprehensible is that this feature is opt-out instead of opt-in. I strongly suspect that most users would not agree to enable data sharing if they were asked directly.

To be very precise about session recording: you can inspect the Cursor binary and see that it comes bundled with rrweb and full telemetry infrastructure setup is in place: mouse movements, clicks, scroll positions, etc. on top of the codebase and prompts being sent over the wire.

However, I have edited my other claims for now and you can consider them provisionally retracted. My original advice about turning off data sharing stands. You are right to ask for more evidence given the severity of the claims. I think this merits a deeper dive, and a throwaway hacker news comment might not be the best channel for it. Stay tuned ;)

Important disclaimer for anyone using Cursor: make sure to disable "data sharing" in your account settings, as it is enabled by default and old accounts are automatically opted into it.

Well you still need some human prompting the AI and looking at results, no? :)

Agents aren't picky with UI, so most effort will always be spent designing for humans, even if they are not the primary consumers.

This looks really cool. However, the current AI models are pretty good at designing UIs from prompts and even turning screenshots of mocks into full UIs. I'm not sure this visual design approach would save time vs simply prompting an AI agent.

That being said, I could see a niche market for a designer persona who is used to building in tools like figma.

So what would you think of something that works mostly autonomously but pings you on your phone if it needs input?

I've been working on something along those lines (multi-agent orchestration IDE) for the last few months as a personal project.

There are also a lot of projects out there approaching this from many different angles.

Curious what features people would like to see in an Agentic IDE? Would you like to instruct multiple agents in real time (like vibe coding on steroids) or dispatch autonomous agents to solve a long-running task? Something else?