u/RegularSalamander212

spent months fighting this issue where cursor would work great for the first 20 messages of a chat and then suddenly start hallucinating dependencies that didn't exist or referencing functions I deleted three prompts ago. the conversation would get too long and the context window would fill up and it would just start making things up.

the fix that actually worked was so stupid I almost didn't try it. instead of continuing the same chat I just start a new one every 10 messages and paste the last 5 messages back in as context. sounds inefficient but it's actually faster because I don't spend two hours debugging code that was never real in the first place.

also noticed that if I keep the prompts shorter and more specific it holds context longer. the massive "build me everything" prompts are the ones that break the fastest. one thing at a time and the quality stays consistent.

anyone else dealing with this context decay thing or is it just my project getting too big

honest comparison after using both for a real project not just toy demos:

claude is slower. like noticeably slower. but the code it generates actually works first try more often than not. I've shipped features with claude code that I didn't have to touch after. the state management is cleaner. the widget structure is actually logical. it's not perfect but it's close enough that I can ship.

chatgpt is faster and the interface is better but it hallucinates packages that don't exist and it loves overengineering things. I'll ask for a simple list view and it'll give me a full architecture with provider and riverpod and a custom theme system. impressive but not helpful when you're trying to ship in a week.

the thing that surprised me is that claude actually understands flutter better than chatgpt does. it knows when to use stateful vs stateless. it knows when a future is actually needed. chatgpt just defaults to everything being a future because that's the pattern it's seen most often.

curious what other people's experience has been. maybe I'm just using them wrong

spent months fighting this issue where cursor would work great for the first 20 messages of a chat and then suddenly start hallucinating dependencies that didn't exist or referencing functions I deleted three prompts ago. the conversation would get too long and the context window would fill up and it would just start making things up.

the fix that actually worked was so stupid I almost didn't try it. instead of continuing the same chat I just start a new one every 10 messages and paste the last 5 messages back in as context. sounds inefficient but it's actually faster because I don't spend two hours debugging code that was never real in the first place.

also noticed that if I keep the prompts shorter and more specific it holds context longer. the massive "build me everything" prompts are the ones that break the fastest. one thing at a time and the quality stays consistent.

anyone else dealing with this context decay thing or is it just my project getting too big

had this happen yesterday. asked cursor to fix a layout issue that had been broken for two days. gave it a fairly vague prompt because I was frustrated. it fixed the layout AND somehow improved the animation smoothness on a completely different screen

I sat there for like ten minutes trying to figure out what it actually changed. the diff showed modifications to a file I forgot existed. and it works. perfectly. but I genuinely cannot explain what it did or why it works now

this is the part nobody talks about in the whole "vibe coding" thing. sometimes you're not building anymore, you're just accepting gifts from a black box and praying nothing breaks later

anyone else just have code in their project that works and you've silently agreed to never touch it

biggest lesson from 6 months of building with AI and I wish someone had told me this on day one

never ask for more than one change per prompt. ever. I don't care how simple the changes seem

I used to do stuff like "add dark mode and fix the navigation and update the fonts" thinking it would save time and cursor would do all three and somehow break the login screen in the process, something I hadn't even touched, and I'd sit there for an hour trying to figure out what happened because the diff was so massive I couldn't tell which change caused which problem

now my workflow is embarrassingly simple:
one prompt. test it. commit. next prompt.
one prompt. test it. commit. next prompt.

feels painfully slow at first but you literally never spend an entire evening debugging something that was working fine yesterday afternoon

also protip: describe what you want in plain english. I tried using technical jargon early on thinking it would help cursor understand better. it didn't. "make the button feel satisfying to press with a little bounce when you tap it" worked way better than any technical spec I wrote about animation curves and duration parameters

what's your workflow look like? genuinely curious if anyone found something faster

took me an embarrassingly long time to figure this out but the single biggest change I made was just asking for one thing at a time

like I used to type these massive prompts. "build me a dashboard with mood tracking and a streak counter and journal entries and analytics and make it look clean" and every single time cursor would spit out something that half worked with three new bugs I didn't have before. I'd spend the rest of the night untangling it and by 2am I'd be further behind than where I started

then one random tuesday I just tried being stupidly specific. "build a circular progress ring that fills based on streak count with the number in the center." thats it. one thing. and it worked first try

sounds obvious when I say it now but I genuinely fought this for weeks because it felt slower. it's not. it's way faster because you never have to go backwards

anyone else have a pattern that changed everything for them?

I think most of us already know enough to start something
we just keep telling ourselves we need one more course, one more tutorial, one more understanding

I did that for like 2 years
kept learning, bookmarking things, watching videos, feeling productive
but never actually building anything real

a few weeks ago I got tired of it and just started trying to build something anyway using AI

it was messy, broke every 10 minutes, half the time I had no idea what I was doing

but within days I had something that actually worked

not good, not scalable, but real

and that’s when it hit me

I wasn’t stuck. I was just avoiding the part where things feel stupid and unclear...

like that moment where nothing works and you realize you don’t actually understand anything yet

that’s the part I kept escaping by “learning more”

idk
feels like a lot of us are doing that without admitting it

you don’t really “write” everything

you explain what you want

it gives something close

you fix it

break something else

fix that

repeat until it somehow works

it feels less like coding and more like managing a junior dev who’s fast but gets confused easily

weird part is

the better you get at this, the less you think in code

you think in outcomes

feels like a different skill entirely

curious how others are approaching this

I think most of us already know enough to start something
we just keep telling ourselves we need one more course, one more tutorial, one more understanding

I did that for like 2 years
kept learning, bookmarking things, watching videos, feeling productive
but never actually building anything real

a few weeks ago I got tired of it and just started trying to build something anyway using AI

it was messy, broke every 10 minutes, half the time I had no idea what I was doing

but within days I had something that actually worked

not good, not scalable, but real

and that’s when it hit me

I wasn’t stuck. I was just avoiding the part where things feel stupid and unclear

like that moment where nothing works and you realize you don’t actually understand anything yet

that’s the part I kept escaping by “learning more”

idk
feels like a lot of us are doing that without admitting it

not trying to start something just noticing a pattern

people who couldn't build anything a year ago are now shipping real stuff. not perfectly engineered, probably not scalable, but usable and live and real

meanwhile a lot of "learning to code properly" people are still grinding through tutorials

feels like the gap is shifting from who can code to who can actually direct and get things out the door

anyone else noticing this or am I just in a weird corner of the internet...