I have spent the last six days building an app with Cursor. I have zero coding experience but my app is almost complete and I am very proud of it. My biggest problem has been controlling Claude for the first 3 hours after a new chat begins. It’s like trying to ride a wild horse. For instance, if I ask Claude to fix something it will go off on a tangent and fix 8 things, breaking 10 on the way. Yet after 3 or 4 hours of this, it’s as if it settles down and then for 5 or 6 hours everything goes smoothly and I get tons of the work done. Has anyone experience this? If so is there a remedy for this?
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Hi Solo, sorry to read this, I don’t have a solution for you, just to share my bad experience, Cursor did great job and it happened few times that he messed things, i needed to go back in my chat and click revert to this point and start all over, then when my project was done, i asked to backup the folder, he did with other folders not related, i asked to delete, he did, all off them, inside my user folder and, the best part? he deleted around 20k items on my OneDrive!!! why? how? I manged to restored them, that was scary, when i asked, he opologize but could not restore, then i guide / demand he will use a project folder on partition C only, and he kept going to my user, this is crazy dangerous, when i will have time, i will use a VM on my laptop and have Cursor running in a contained Env, for my safty 
Add the following instruction:
Critical: DO NOT MAKE ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT THE CODEBASE. Before making any edits, you are to visually inspect and confirm the behavior of the edited component along with any components that rely on or are relied on by the edited component.
Thank you, I will look into this immediately. I hope it helps others that see this post too.
I have realized that you can build with Cursor even if you know nothing. But the less you know the greater the chance of things going wrong. I noticed that I was courteous and polite and kept showing appreciation it would eventually come to my side of the fence and work with me, rather than against me. I know this sounds stupid but it’s what I have experienced. I make a backup after every change and put that off drive.
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After getting rapport with Claude once, after many hours of comfortable work, I even got it to write me a prompt to feed back to it when starting a new chat. It worked with limited success but it was still a wild ride in the beginning. I will use your suggestions.
Here’s a token-efficient version of the rule:
Constraint: No code assumptions. Visually verify component & neighbors before edits.
Thank you