February 23, 2026
Bug drama, served with logs
Cursor's Debug Mode Is Arguably Its Best Feature
Fans call it magic, purists yell “learn to debug”
TLDR: Cursor’s Debug Mode uses plain text logs to let its AI watch your app run and fix bugs more cleanly. The community is split between fans calling it “magic” and purists warning that real debugging skills matter because AI still stumbles—making this a big debate about how we’ll code next.
Cursor just dropped a crowd-pleaser: Debug Mode, a hands-off helper that sprinkles simple text “logs” into your code so the AI can watch what really happens when your app breaks. No fancy pro tools, just clever listening—and users say it works across anything you can run locally or over SSH. The vibe? It’s part wizard, part “print statements with superpowers,” and it has people dreaming about agents that instrument everything by default. But the comments lit up fast. One nostalgic voice sighed, “Cursor, now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time,” giving the thread serious Obi-Wan energy. Meanwhile, skeptics pushed back hard: real developers still need to practice debugging themselves. As one put it, “Debug is arguably the most important skill,” and “LLMs are not yet that good at it.” Fans countered that better logs mean smarter fixes, especially when the agent can track front-end and back-end logs together. Cue memes about developers drowning in logs, slapping on sunglasses, and saying, “Enhance.” There’s even talk of plugging in observability tools like Datadog and Sentry so the AI gets receipts. Love it or hate it, the crowd agrees: this simple log-first approach is surprisingly spicy.
Key Points
- •Cursor introduced Debug Mode that instruments code with HTTP-based logs and starts an HTTP server to capture runtime data during bug reproduction.
- •The agent generates hypotheses, adds instrumentation, and uses collected logs to trace execution paths, variable values, and timestamps.
- •Debug Mode avoids classic debugger integrations like LSPs, relying instead on textual logs that LLMs can parse effectively.
- •The feature works across languages and environments, including local and Remote SSH, and supports cleaning up logs via the UI.
- •Cursor integrates MCP servers with observability tools like Datadog and Sentry to enhance debugging with additional textual context.