There’s AI and there’s “AI”, and this whole drama would have been avoided by returning links to an FAQ rather found using embedding search rather than actually then trying to turn it into a textual answer, which — working with these systems all day — is madness

> Don't use AI. Actually care.

I agree with this. Also, whenever I care about code, I don’t use AI. So I very rarely use AI assistants for coding.

I guess this is why Cursor is interested in making AI assistants popular everywhere, they don’t want the association that “AI assisted” means careless. Even when it does, at least with today’s level of AI.

The amount paid is still pretty trivial. I wouldn’t expect much human support for most SaaS products costing $20 a month.

If you are charging people money, they deserve support. If Cursor's revenues are anything close to what is reported they can easily afford a support team - they just don't want to because they don't see the value.

Support quality depends on how much the company wants to keep that particular user. There are companies with better support for cheaper products and companies with worse support for more expensive products.

I've had great support from Jetbrains when I was paying less than that

Because this makes no sense.

Do they advertise that there's no support when you pay $20? I'm gonna take a guess that they don't.

They are getting paid by their customers and if they can't sustain their business (which includes support) with it they are under pricing their product and should have consequences for it.

A business is a business and we should stop treating startups as special. They operate on the same rules and standards that everyone else does.

If this incident happened to me, I think I'd 100% give them a pass because Cursor is my favorite and most used subscription.

I've gotten a lot of value out of it over the past year, and often feel that I'm underpaying for what I'm getting.

To me, any type of business is a business. I'd treat Cursor as special because it is special.

Not trying to defend them, but I think it’s a problem of scaling up. The user base grew very quickly and keeping up with the support inquiries must be a tough job. Therefore the first like of defense is AI support replies.

I agree with you, they should care.

Then you use AI for triaging or summation to help you provide better support faster. You don't let it respond to users unchecked.

Given how they started... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30011965

(Today I learned)

They’re like a team of 10 people with thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of users. “Actually care” is not a viable path to success here.

Then hire support. They are selling a service and getting lots of money for it. They should be able to support like any other company.

Hmmm how do you possibly increase team size to have a support team with millions of dollars in funding?

Why do tech companies get a hand-wavy pass for basic customer service just because they're really big now? In what way is tech special compared to literally anything else?

If you can't sustain a business, it shouldn't exist?

You don’t need to offer support to sustain a business. Look at Ryan Air, who are notorious for not doing so. Support is extremely costly and basically impossible to do well at a large scale. I forgive them for having some issues under their circumstances.

They raised $60 million—they can't afford to build out support a bit?

"It is hard to make a good product so instead we'll make a crap product that treats our employees like shit" is not really an excuse in my mind.

Yes it is.