[obviyus]

It's hard to explain but over the last couple of months I have an intuitive sense of when Claude (the web version) starts to lose context over a problem. Over there it's as simple as starting a new chat and building on top of that.

To me, it felt like Cursor blurred that line too much for my liking. The way I use LLMs is by giving it atomic, independant chunks of code that I need to review / refactor which, in my experience, leads to far superior output. I'm sure there's some way to make it work with Cursor but it just didn't click for me.

[emptiestplace]

It sounds like we use LLMs similarly. I've been a bit worried I'm missing out on some of these more sophisticated tools, but I kinda figured it would go like this. Likewise, anything with 'copilot' in the name is fucking garbage.

In the future, we might not have to helicopter-parent the context window, but we definitely aren't there yet. I suspect nearly everyone who speaks poorly of LLMs simply hasn't figured this out yet.

I have created two simple scripts to help me with this workflow, `pc` and `po`. `pc` accepts a list of files and concatenates sanitized versions into the clipboard buffer, each file enclosed in triple backticks and prefixed with its filename. `po` accepts a single file, reverses sanitization and displays a diff between clipboard buffer and the specified file. It's not much, but it significant accelerates this workflow for me.

If the whole world hasn't completely left me behind by next week, I might look into adding some sort of AST-based diff/merge in `po`. It'd be nice not needing to constantly remind the LLM to output only changed files, complete, with no omissions.