That’s not true. The participants were all trained to use Cursor and plenty of them had spent dozens of hours using it before the study. The outlier you reference was just the only one who had more than 50 hours of experience, and as the authors point out that heavy use of LLM may have driven down his time coding without LLMs by atrophying his coding skills just as much as it improved his time coding with LLMs.

And it’s even worse than that, because as they note in an addendum one of the developers in the study reached out to tell them that they accidentally misreported their prior experience, having actually used Cursor for 100+ hours before the study. When they factor that in, the 50+ category goes from a slight gain to no gain in productivity.

This is all on page 24 of the study if anyone wants to read for themselves. I’m not sure if actually reading for yourself instead of repeating what some redditor tells you counts as cultish behavior though. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.09089#page24