1 min lesson
Context engineering: indexing, @-references, context window
Use "The single biggest determinant of whether a team loves or abandons Cursor is not the model" to describe the practical rule.
Step 1 of 4
The single biggest determinant of whether a team loves or abandons Cursor is not the model. It is the context the model receives.
Every response Agent or Ask produces is grounded in a slice of the codebase assembled at that moment. Get that slice right and the output looks like it was written by someone who knows the repo. Get it wrong and you get confident, plausible, completely off-base code. The team blames "the AI," but the failure was upstream.
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Full explanation
How Context Reaches the Model
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Retrieval and your @-curation feed one finite budget; the window is the gate everything must fit through.