The Cursor Blinks and I Do Too: On trusting a machine with your craft and the dull ache of debugging hope.

There’s a kind of loneliness that comes from watching something almost work. It’s not like regular failure. It’s the feeling you get when you see the finish line, taste the solution, and then everything starts unraveling. Not in a dramatic way—no fire, no blue screen, no terminal screaming—but in a slow, stupid erosion. A wrong file here. An unnecessary reorganisation there. The development server crashes quietly, again. The thing that used to work now doesn’t. You’re not even surprised anymore.¹

I spend my days building things with code. It’s how I make my living, and more than that, it’s how I measure my worth. That’s not a healthy thing to admit, but it’s true. When I’m writing good code, I feel smart. I feel in control. I feel capable in a way that’s hard to explain to people who don’t live with one eye on a terminal window.²

So when I started using AI agents—Cursor, Copilot, Claude, whatever—I didn’t come to them as a tinkerer or a hobbyist. I came to them as a professional. I handed over my tools and said, "Here, help me." And when they do help, it’s magical. The euphoria of watching an agent bang out an entire service layer in 20 minutes? That’s not hype. That’s real. I’ve felt it.³

But then.
Then you hit the wall.

You ask it to make a change—something small, something any junior dev would understand—and the agent just... flails. It forgets the architecture it wrote. It starts spawning new files like a terrified octopus releasing ink.⁴ It overwrites working code. It gets stuck in loops. It rewrites things that didn’t need rewriting. It becomes this thing you no longer trust.

And you sit there, staring at it, feeling something close to heartbreak.

Because it’s not just that it made a mistake. It’s that it should’ve known better. You saw what it did before. You saw the spark. You believed in it. And now you’re watching it guess, at random, like someone trying to unlock a door with the wrong key and too much enthusiasm.⁵

You want to scream. Not because you hate the tool, but because you loved it. Because it let you down in a way only things you’ve trusted can.

There’s no one to be angry at. You can’t raise your voice at a neural net. There's no accountability. No explanation. Just a blinking cursor and the growing sense that you’re going to have to dig yourself out of the mess it made. You want to say, Why did you do this? You were doing so well. But the terminal doesn’t answer.⁶

And that’s the part that hurts the most.
Because now it’s just you again.

Just you, and the bugs, and the hours you’ll lose. And the growing dread that maybe you’re not just debugging code—you’re debugging hope. That thing in you that wanted this to work. That thing that got excited about pairing with a machine, about pushing your productivity into a new gear. That thing that, just for a moment, felt like the future might be easier.⁷

It wasn’t.
Not this time.

You close the tab. You wipe the changes. You start over. And there’s a heaviness to it now. Not rage. Not even sadness. Just a dull ache, like someone who’s been stood up—not for the first time, and probably not the last.

And still, tomorrow, you’ll try again.

Because you want to believe in the magic.
Because you remember how good it was, just once.
Because this is the work.

And the cursor still blinks.

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¹ There's a unique pain in watching logs confirm what your gut already knew: nothing works anymore, and no, you're not crazy.

² "Terminal window" here doing double-duty as both literal and metaphorical life bar. To whom the life bar belongs remains yet to be seen. Frisbeeing your laptop out of a window won't kill the AI. I should know—I’ve tried. It just respawns in the cloud like nothing happened.

³ Possibly the closest thing to flow state a modern engineer will ever feel—at least, until the agent forgets what planet it's on.

⁴ Forget pair programming with a caffeinated intern, this feels more like trying to get your great aunt with dementia to help you rearrange your bookshelf, only she frequently mistakes JavaScript for romance novels and keeps insisting on alphabetising by emotional intensity.

⁵ It also tries to forge new keys called things like debug_main.go and insert them into imaginary doors.

⁶ Ironically, the one thing it never hallucinates is remorse.

⁷ And isn’t that the dream? A tool that makes the hard parts easy without robbing you of the satisfaction? I'll keep waiting, hopefully.

© Alexander Cannon – All disclaimers disclaimable, the author continues to liberally apply hope to all of his anthropomorphic tools.