Cursor f*ked up a developer’s 4 months of works!

I came across a Reddit post yesterday that made my stomach drop. A fellow developer shared:

"Disclamer, I'm a moron who worked on the same project without thinking about the risk that Cursor could break everything. Yesterday, Cursor (even though I only asked it to feed a view on my UI) destroyed months of development."

Reading this felt like watching a horror movie where you know something bad is coming but you can't look away. Months of work, gone. And the worst part? They weren't doing anything particularly risky - just asking Cursor (an AI-powered code editor) to help with a simple UI view.

Their follow-up question broke my heart a little:

"How do you back up your projects/versions to ensure that the next action on cursor is reversible?"

It's the digital equivalent of asking "how do I install smoke detectors?" after your house has already burned down.

We've All Been There

Maybe you haven't lost months of work, but I bet most developers reading this have had that moment of panic when something goes wrong and you realize you haven't committed your changes in... wait, how long has it been?

I used to think I was pretty disciplined with Git. Then I started paying attention to my actual habits:

• Sometimes I go hours deep into a problem without committing

• I've definitely left my editor open overnight with uncommitted changes (dangerous!)

• I've asked GitHub Copilot to "fix this function" without really thinking about what else it might touch

• I've experienced that moment of dread when you realize you just did something destructive and your last commit was too long ago

The truth is, standard Git workflows were designed before AI tools entered the picture. They rely on us remembering to commit at reasonable intervals. But when you're in the flow state, especially with AI tools rapidly suggesting changes, that manual process breaks down.

The AI Wild West

What's troubling about our Reddit friend's experience is that it's becoming more common. AI tools like Cursor, Copilot, and ChatGPT-powered coding assistants are incredibly powerful, but they're also unpredictable in ways traditional tools aren't.

A traditional IDE doesn't suddenly decide to refactor your entire codebase when you just wanted to tweak one function. But AI tools sometimes do exactly that - they misunderstand scope, lack context, or simply make mistakes in their eagerness to help.

What I Built to Solve This

After experiencing a few too many close calls myself, I started building Xferro. The idea came from a simple question: why can't Git protection be automatic and continuous, like how Google Docs saves every change?

Here's how it works:

1. When you create a branch in Xferro, it automatically creates a backup branch

2. Every time you make a change to your files - whether manually or through an AI tool - Xferro automatically commits those changes to the backup branch

3. These changes are immediately pushed to your remote repository

The key insight was realizing that backup branches should be separate from your working branches. You still maintain a clean, well-structured history on your main development branches, but you have this parallel history capturing every change if you need it.

What This Means for Our Reddit Friend

If our unfortunate Reddit developer had been using Xferro, their story would have ended very differently.

The Real Issue

I think there's a deeper problem here that goes beyond any specific tool. As developers, we're naturally optimistic about technology. We assume things will work as expected. We don't plan for disasters until after we've experienced one.

But the nature of development is changing. We're increasingly collaborating with AI systems that, while powerful, lack the caution and context-awareness that humans have. They'll happily make sweeping changes without warning you of the potential consequences.

Our protection mechanisms need to evolve accordingly. The old wisdom of "commit often, push regularly" isn't wrong - it's just insufficient when you're working with tools that can transform your codebase in seconds.