Cursor built your project file by file — and now nothing connects

Cursor's core interaction model — inline edits and file-scoped generation — creates a specific class of bugs that other AI tools don't produce. When you ask Cursor to edit a function, it sees the current file and maybe a few referenced files. It generates code that is locally correct but globally inconsistent. The function signature changes, but the twelve call sites in other files still pass the old arguments. The type definition updates, but the API response handler three folders away still expects the previous shape. Each individual edit is reasonable; the accumulated drift across dozens of edits makes the project structurally unsound.

Cursor's Composer mode attempts to solve this with multi-file edits, but introduces its own pattern of failure. Composer tends to regenerate files rather than surgically edit them, which means your manual tweaks and customizations get overwritten. It also resolves conflicts by defaulting to the most recent context, so if you've been iterating on a feature, Composer might revert architectural decisions you made three iterations ago. The result is a codebase where you can't trust which version of any given function is the 'current' one.

Package version drift is the other Cursor-specific trap. Cursor's training data spans multiple major versions of popular frameworks, and it doesn't consistently check your `package.json` before generating code. You end up with Next.js 13 app-router patterns mixed with Next.js 12 pages-directory code, or React Server Components syntax in a client-side-only Vite project. The code looks right — it was right, for a different version of the framework.