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by Otterly99 20 days ago
Unless you're working on private data, is it such a problem to let Cursor train on your data?

I personally work mostly on small, unoriginal projects. I don't really mind letting Cursor keep the data for training if it leads to a better product for me.

4 comments

It's not a problem for you maybe, but if you run a business providing some niche specific software in some area, having the model suck up all your code and learn from it is pretty harmful because your competitors and customers will be able to vibe code your product after the next model release. You're training a competitor to your business. People are very worried about this which is why companies like Claude don't train on enterprise data, and for lots of companies this exact situation is a deal breaker.
I often do reverse engineering work.

I find the idea of all the AI tools I use keeping all the (mangled, decompiled, and not even mine in the first place) code I point it at, and then using it in training to be hilarious.

And if it results in the next generation of AIs having more suspicious knowledge of proprietary software internals and better reverse engineering capabilities, then all the better.

If I'm working on something open source I actually would not mind as much. (I can understand why many folks don't like the models being trained with impunity on ALL the open-source code out there, but personally I think it's fine for my open-source code.)

However, I am working on some projects where I think I've stumbled on genuinely interesting and valuable technical approaches, and I'm still figuring out how to capitalize on them. As such I am a bit paranoid about my ideas leaking via some training dataset.

Heck, it could end up as nothing more than a blog post that nobody reads, but at least I get to publish it.

It's the same as any service that makes you opt out of sucking up your data. It's a bad default, and it's not obvious to the average that it's even happening.