Ask HN: Cursor is productive for an hour, then burns my application down
7 campervans 9 6/2/2025, 2:41:09 PM
I can control it well for an hour or two using .md files, and breaking everything down into small tasks, but then out of nowhere it burns everything down, goes into 10x technical debt and replaces everything with placeholders
If your asking how to have everything attention we currently can't.
So you're saying I need some adderral.ai
Define a feature in detail (using trascription) -> Get o3 or Gemini 2.5 pro to break it down into very small testable tasks. -> review this -> then paste into a tasks.md file -> write and architecture.md file or similar for any additional context needed. -> then prompt Cursor to work through tasks.md step by step.
This keeps it on track, with the whole feature defined from the outset.
But eventually... it will try to ignore the dockerfile and setup up locally, create multiple .env files, write code with placeholders, ignore a files it's just created and written...
It's impossible to get it back on track - it gets into a debug loop of making things worse rather than getting back on track.
I keep the working versions on a Word file on a Landscape, A3, 3 columns (version number, comment/changelog, the_code)(yes, cheap, scalable, easy).
So, every 5-7 versions, I start a new chat. I ask ChatGPT to read/write a summary/description of the code, and then I proceed to ask it for new changes/enhancements.