That's not a stupid question at all, and yes they can. Cursive works using static analysis rather than runtime introspection, so I need to teach it how macro forms work. This uses an extension API internally which will eventually be open so that users can add support for their own forms or forms in libs they use. Cursive uses the information about the macro forms to do symbol resolution, so that's currently a best effort in the presence of forms it doesn't understand yet. It works pretty well though since Clojure doesn't tend to use as many macros as, say, Racket. Doing full resolution means that I can distinguish clojure.core/-> from some other symbol with the same short name, it's not just using the -> text.

One correction - this is all done at edit time, not compile time. At compile time there's no issue since all macros are expanded to the core language.