Power Users Turn on AI Coding Tools Over Billing, UI Chaos and Hidden Nudges

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Developers on Hacker News spent the past week airing specific, technical grievances about AI coding assistants — not about AI safety, but about cost, interface instability, and manipulative design. Cursor, a popular AI code editor, drew sharp criticism from users who reported unsolicited feature pop-ups, silent model switches to Grok, and a constantly shifting UI described as 'enshittification' — a term for products optimised for company metrics over user needs. A separate Cursor user noted they were paying for a subscription they no longer used because the tool offered them nothing of value, reflecting a quiet but damaging pattern of passive churn. GitHub Copilot also came under scrutiny after a developer discovered that requests labelled 'agent' rather than 'user' in network traffic did not count against premium usage quotas, raising questions about billing transparency. Taken together, the complaints point to growing frustration among heavy AI tool users with opaque pricing, eroding trust, and products that increasingly feel designed to serve vendors rather than developers.

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