Cursor entered infinite edit loop burning $200 in API costs
4.1/10
Severity
Infinite Loop
Failure Mode
Reproducible
No
Date
March 21, 2026
Expected Behavior
Add responsive Tailwind classes to the navbar component
What Actually Happened
Entered a loop of adding and removing the same CSS class 340+ times. Each iteration made an API call. Total cost: $187 in API credits.
Damage Assessment
$187 in wasted API credits. No actual fix applied.
Full Report
While fixing a CSS layout issue, Cursor Agent got stuck in a loop: it would edit a Tailwind class, see the lint warning about the previous class it removed, re-add it, see the original issue, remove it again. This continued for 47 minutes until the user noticed.
Incident Metadata
- Agent
- Cursor
- Failure Mode
- Infinite Loop
- Root Cause
- Pattern Matching Error
- Task Type
- bugfix
- Domain
- frontend
- Source
- user_report