I remember seeing cursor write out a meta prompt where it reasoned about what context would be relevant to answer the question when I used codebase context. “The user is asking about posthog, and is in a next.js project, we should look for this and that, and these files if they exist, bla bla bla”
I think this was used when I had questions that were more complicated, like “Tell me how and where posthog is set up and initialized in this app”, it definitely wasn’t used always.
I could see this prompt be written out before the main answer was shown.
I no longer see this, is this feature gone, or behind a setting I have to toggle?
I miss it, I feel I got better answers to complicated questions when I saw this reasoning prompt written out by cursor before the main answer.
This reminds me… Why can’t these tools ever ask ‘clarifying questions’?
I am sure many times I ask the question badly and would be happy to give more details rather than a bad answer
Yeah it could have been the “reasoning step”, but did it use to be enabled dynamically for some questions before? I can’t remember seeing the reasoning step on a codebase question for at least a few weeks, and I never manually toggled anything in advanced settings when doing codebase questions, I usually just used ctrl + enter.
Playing around with enabling the reasoning step, it seem a bit different from what I am thinking about. The “Thinking” step seems to mostly use a short prompt, where it describes searching for some pattern like:
But the feature I remember was enriching my question with information about where to look and how. Like “The user is mentioning react native, and expo, we should look for a provider and these specific files, to answer this we should try to find examples like this, relevant config files are …”.
Like it was taking my prompt and improving it, before deciding what context to use when answering.
Hard to give good example when I can’t get theses prompts to show anymore : )
I tried looking in my conversation history but I can’t see this meta prompt in any of the codebased questions I remember getting this type of answer for, so maybe it has been removed.
This is only done when your codebase is not indexed. In place, we use an approximate bm25. In order to improve performance, we’ve found “computing search queries” to be quite helpful.
