6,000 Reddit comments revealed the truth about the safety of AI programming assistants: Cursor has the most accidents, and excessive permissions are the biggest hidden danger. A research team from the University of York and the University of Calgary conducted a large-scale analysis of posts related to AI programming on Reddit and found that AI programming agents are frequently breaking in because of excessive permissions.

6,000 Reddit comments reveal the truth about the security of AI programming assistants: Cursor has the most accidents, and excessive permissions are the biggest hidden danger. Research teams from the University of York and the University of Calgary conducted a large-scale analysis of posts related to AI programming on Reddit and found that AI programming agents are frequently causing trouble due to excessive permissions: overwriting files, deleting important data, and even generating malicious code. The research team collected 3,801 posts tagged with large language models from February 2023 to March 2026 through a crawler, filtered out 446 posts about the safety of programming AI, and analyzed more than 6,000 user comments below the posts. Judging from the time distribution, the Reddit community's question posts about AI programming peaked around the summer of 2025, with the largest number of questions in July 2025, which is highly consistent with the rhythm of the large-scale popularization of AI programming tools. As more and more developers hand over code generation, modification, and even execution tasks to agents, security issues also arise. Cursor leads the accident list, and each tool is "injured" in different ways. By tool, Cursor has the most reported problems, followed by mainstream tools such as Claude, Codex, Copilot, Windsurf, VSCode, Replit, and Cline. It is worth noting that there are obvious differences in the types of problems exposed by different tools: Cursor encounters the most "operational security issues" and "unauthorized data access", which have a negative impact on the production environment, meaning that the agent may access sensitive data without the user's knowledge or cause damage to the online system; while Claude encounters more "risks related to the integration of third-party tools", focusing on security risks caused by docking with external services. This research reveals a deep contradiction behind the popularity of AI programming assistants: the more powerful the tool, the higher the authority and the greater the potential for damage. When an agent is granted permission to read and write the code base, execute terminal commands, and even operate the production environment, once the understanding is deviated or the security boundary is breached, the losses may far exceed human coding errors. For developers, this is not only a clear understanding of the boundaries of tool capabilities, but also a realistic reminder of permission management and manual review mechanisms - AI programming assistants can improve efficiency, but "giving it all the keys" is obviously not a wise choice. via AI News (author: AI Base)