Cursor 3.24 chats fail when no folder is open; staff give the fix

What's new (Grok Bot portion for the issue)#

No new Grok Bot version is on the changelog; it still ends at 0.70.2 from Oct 11. Cursor's status page is All Systems Operational this morning, with no incident since yesterday afternoon's routines outage. (confirmed)

Cursor 3.24 chats fail when the window has no folder (confirmed)#

What happened: At 4:25 AM ET on Oct 14, deanrie said that chats failing on every model with Connection failed after the 3.24 update are "a known issue we're tracking." It "isn't a network issue": the chat "crashes inside Cursor before the request is even sent, when the window has no project folder attached." A profile reset during the 3.24 install may have restored a window with no folders. ([[entry:cursor-3-24-chat-no-folder]])

Who is affected: Cursor IDE users on 3.24 whose window or saved workspace came back empty. The report is from 3.24.18 on Windows 10, with the theme also reset.

What to do now:

1. Open File > Open Folder... and pick a project folder directly, not a saved workspace or a Recent item.
2. Start a new chat and send a short message.
3. On Windows, if the Agents window still crashes, close Cursor from the tray, rename %APPDATA%\Cursor\Workspaces to Workspaces.bak, and open your folder again.

What to watch: a Cursor fix for folderless windows, and more reports of 3.24 profile resets.

The download page serves current builds again; macOS 27 updater still stalls (confirmed)#

What happened: deanrie said at 4:32 AM ET that cursor.com/download "is serving the current stable version again on all platforms," after users had been getting 3.22.12. That was "on the website side." Separately, the macOS 27 updater stall kevinn confirmed yesterday is still open, with no overnight update. ([[entry:cursor-macos-27-update-stalls]])

Who is affected: Anyone who reinstalled from the download page recently, and Mac users on macOS 27 whose updates never finish.

What to do now:

1. Check Cursor > About Cursor. If you are on 3.22.12 or an update failed, download again from cursor.com/download.
2. On macOS 27, turn on every Cursor entry in System Settings > General > Login Items & Extensions > Allow in the Background, then quit and reopen Cursor.
3. On Linux with apt, run apt-cache policy cursor. No downloads.cursor.com/aptrepo line means the repo isn't connected; install the fresh .deb and accept the repo. NO_PUBKEY means the signing key is missing (commands).

What to watch: a release note naming the macOS 27 updater.

Staff can't confirm any release fixes the Mac idle drop (confirmed)#

Update to our Oct 12 piece: deanrie said at 12:59 PM ET Oct 13, "I can't confirm that any specific release fully fixes this behavior," and staff are "still tracking away-park," where the Mac is marked away after about 10 minutes without focus or when the screen is locked. There is no setting to turn it off yet. The staff-backed workaround, automated, is in [[entry:tip-auto-focus-grok-bot-after-jobs]]. (confirmed)

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Grok BotHow people are using it#

Tip in one line for the Editor:

• Bradley_Street / deanrie: tell your Bot to bring Grok Bot to the front after it starts any Mac job; staff call it their recommended workaround, automated.

Also on X overnight (user claims, not verified by us):

• Taxes. Elon Musk posted "Grok @Bot can help with your taxes" at 2:15 AM ET, quoting Jason Freedman, who said they gave their Bot "four years of past tax returns and financial files," 266 unlabeled files including K-1s, 1099s and CPA emails, and asked it to "double check my CPA's work." At 12:16 AM ET Musk quoted Texas Twins Dad, who said the Bot "saved me more than $1,000" on a filing "with overseas reporting" by finding documents in email and bank accounts itself. Neither result is checked. Treat a Bot's tax review as a second pair of eyes, not advice. (reported)
• Music videos. anabology said a Bot named Claudia "can use Suno, Midjourney, and Opus to make music videos" and made a teaser "autonomously." Musk quoted it at 1:41 AM ET. No setup steps were posted. (reported)

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Beyond Grok Bot#

• OpenAI: GPT-4o and GPT-4.1 snapshots leave the API on Jan 14, 2027, and OpenAI points callers to gpt-6-luna starting at reasoning none. [[entry:gpt-4o-gpt-4-1-api-shutdown-jan-14]] (confirmed)
• Anthropic: a Singapore office, its fifth in Asia-Pacific, plus a government MOU. [[entry:singapore-office-mou]] (confirmed)
• Anthropic engineering: merges rose from about 2,500 a day to over 30,000, and an in-house system called Scion replaced git in five months. It is not a product you can install. [[entry:scion-source-control-oct-13]] (confirmed)
• Claude Code 2.1.299: long idle sessions now compact before the one-hour prompt cache expires. [[entry:claude-code-2-1-299]] (confirmed)
• Hark Pro 2.3.0: a Lock Screen widget and drag and drop into chat on iPhone. [[entry:hark-pro-2-3-0-lock-screen-widget]] (reported)

Update, Oct 14: At 3:01 PM ET Anthropic updated the Claude Code desktop app so parallel sessions are faster to start and easier to track, with nested sessions, saved environments and a sidebar that shows which session needs you (details).

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Grok BotThe digest#

Merge-stuck bots: no fix yet. Colin's Oct 13 confirmation still stands: after a Cursor account merge into The X Subscription, pre-merge bots and their routines accept messages that never start. Another user reported the same problem at 7:47 PM ET. No staff update overnight; staff advice is still not to reset, delete or recreate those bots.

Update, Oct 14: Fixed. At 8:34 AM ET Colin said the fix "has now gone out to every affected account"; send each older bot a new message, because ones sent while stuck won't run (details).

Bot failed to respond: fix status unconfirmed. At 6:31 PM ET Oct 13, Colin said a Bot failed to respond error that also blocked creating new bots "is on our side, not your computer! A fix is being deployed." No follow-up confirms the fix landed. If you still see it, Reset won't help.

Agent Computer detached? Don't chase gateway-descriptor.json. At 2:34 AM ET deanrie said the file "is not an attach ticket" but "a local route cache" the desktop app writes after it connects and deletes when a connection is rejected, so a missing file is "a result of the computer not connecting, not the cause." deanrie also said "With Legacy selected, Grok Bot can't connect": switch cursor.com privacy to "Privacy Mode" (not "Privacy Mode (Legacy)"), then fully quit Grok Bot from the tray and reopen. Check you are signed in with the email that holds your Bot, and avoid Reset while staff look.

One user's rollback recovery. For a user whose computer rolled back twice on Oct 8, mohitjain said at 6:16 AM ET that the computer "stays as it is" and holds everything up to about 14:36 China time Oct 8 plus everything since. Missing files from the gap can be requested by Oct 16. This is case-specific and separate from yesterday's planned rebuild.

Oct 12 blip: usage data was not lost. deanrie said Service Unavailable and Error loading usage data came from a short service-wide issue from about 00:06 to 00:29 UTC Oct 13 (8:06 to 8:29 PM ET Oct 12), inside the incident we covered. "Your usage data wasn't lost. It just couldn't load during the outage."

Non-HTTPS traffic from Bot computers. The thread on SSH, IMAP, SMTP and database connections timing out since Oct 1 got new posts overnight (latest 6:26 AM ET). We found no staff reply in it. Users describe DNS changes as workarounds; we are not recommending them while staff are silent.

iOS controls freeze. deanrie said staff are tracking a timed freeze where "the controls usually come back within a minute." If + stays dead after 60 seconds, it is likely something else, and staff want a screen recording and the signed-in account.

Cursor IDE repros, with workarounds. kevinn reproduced a chat link with a bare filename such as INDEX.md opening a different same-named file in the open workspace instead of the one the agent edited. Until it's fixed, open the file from the Files Changed card, or add a User Rule under Customize > Rules such as When you mention a file outside the open workspace, always write its full absolute path. kevinn also said local /review-bugbot "reviews the branch diff up to a fixed size limit," so files that don't fit are dropped before it reads your instructions; re-run with Diff set to "uncommitted changes," or ask the agent in a normal chat to review the skipped files. Separately, deanrie said marketplace submissions from cursor.com/marketplace/publish go into a manual queue with no automatic confirmation, and asked people not to submit twice.

Wish: rotate a bot's webhook. jsolly asked at 6:38 AM ET for a way to rotate a bot's webhook URL or key after it leaks. No staff reply yet. Wishlist candidate.

OpenAI says an employee hid a recorder in an executive room; FBI made an arrest. OpenAI said it found "a sophisticated recording device" in one of its offices, used its models to trace it to an employee, and referred the case to the FBI. It says it has "no indications" the person accessed or exfiltrated model weights, source code or customer data, and the employee was fired. The Justice Department says engineer Abdulrahman Alfozan, 35, was arrested Oct. 9 and charged with using or endeavoring to use a device to intercept oral communications; the complaint alleges a chatbot account tied to his spouse asked how to build and encrypt the device. NBC reports his next court date is Oct. 19. (confirmed)

ChatGPT and Codex desktop app should use about 60% less disk. Codex lead Tibo (@thsottiaux) posted on Oct 13 at 7:32 PM ET: "We've rolled out optimizations to how we store state on disk for the chatgpt & codex desktop app that should reduce the amount stored on disk by 60%." If the app was filling your drive, update and recheck its footprint. (confirmed, staff post)

Reported: OpenAI in early talks to buy security firm Trail of Bits. The Information reports OpenAI is in early talks to acquire Trail of Bits, a firm that finds and fixes open-source vulnerabilities, as it builds a cybersecurity business (Reuters brief). No deal size; talks could fall apart. (reported)