All major AI assistants already come with ways to not have any of these issues.

Claude Code has /init, Cursor comes with /Generate Cursor Rules, and so on. It's not even context engineering: There are out of the box tools you can use not to have this happen. And even if they do happen: you can make them never happen again, with these same tools, for your entire organization - if you had invested the time to know how to use them.

It is interesting how these tools split up the development community.

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ceuk 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

CC very regularly ignores very explicit stuff in CLAUDE.md for me, and I know I'm not the only one. The cycle of compacting/starting new conversations feels like a sisyphean spiral of the same undesirable behaviour and I've yet to find a satisfactory solution despite a lot of effort to that end.

I don't think it's fair to dismiss this article as a superficial anti-ai knee jerk. The solutions you describe are far from perfect

	▲	philipp-gayret 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Fair enough. For me compacting conversation always feels a bit weird; I have no way to tell what it effectively deleted from the context but I (very) regularly have it re-read and update CLAUDE.md as part of the process or after "discussions" with the LLM so I would guess that might be why it follows patterns in it a bit stricter for me than for most. It would be nice if the tool took care of that automatically.

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croes 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The issue isn’t in the tool but in the vibe „coder“.

They care like they code: not.

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woolion 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Serious question: I'm currently re-evaluating if Cursor can speed up my daily work. Currently it is not really the case because of the many subtle errors (like switching a ":" for a ","). But mostly the problem I face is that the code base is big, with entirely outdated parts and poorly coded ones. So the AI favors the most common patterns, which are the bad ones. Even with basic instructions like "take inspiration from <part of the code that is very similar and well-written>" it still mostly takes from the overall codebase (which, by the way, was worsened by a big chunk of vibe-coded output that was hastily merged). My understanding is that a rule should essentially do the same as if it is put in the prompt directly. Is there a solution to that?

	▲	philipp-gayret 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		I recently switched to Claude Code, I much prefer it (I end up less in cycles of Cursor getting stuck on problems). Before I used Cursor for some months. > My understanding is that a rule should essentially do the same as if it is put in the prompt directly. Is there a solution to that? Yes from my understanding Cursor Rule files are essentially an invisible prefix to every prompt. I had some issues in the past with Cursor not picking up rule files until I restarted it (some glitch, probably gone by now.). So put something simple like a "version" or for your rules file and ask it what version of the rules are we following for this conversation just to validate that the process is working. For Cursor with larger projects I use a set of larger rule files that always apply. Recently I worked with Spotify's Backstage for example and I had it index online documentation on architecture, build instructions, design, development of certain components, project layout. Easily 500+ lines worth of markdown. I tell Cursor where to look, i.e. online documentation of the libraries you use, reference implementations if you have any, good code examples and why they are good, and then it writes its own rule files - I don't write them manually anymore. That has been working really well for me. If you have a common technology stack you or way of working you can also try throwing in some examples from https://github.com/PatrickJS/awesome-cursorrules For a codebase containing both good and bad code; maybe you can point it to a past change where code was refactored from bad to good, so it can write out what why you prefer which style and how to manage the migration from bad to good. That said; the tools are not perfect. Even with rules the bad output still can happen but larger rule files describing what you'd like to do and what to avoid makes the chance significantly smaller and the tool more pleasant to work with. I recently switched to Claude Code because Cursor tended to get "stuck" on the same problem which I don't really experience with Claude Code but YMMV.