Restarting IDE summarizes context → LLM forgets what it was doing

Bug Reports
1
  1. Had a long session >1d.
  2. Restarted IDE.
  3. Submitted a prompt → “Summarizing context” → started completing old instructions for the new code.
  4. Stopped execution before it could apply it, but left its message (after “Summarizing context”).
  5. Restarted IDE.
  6. The first prompt: “Why not proceed with the steps as I instructed?” → “Summarizing context” → started completing old instructions for the new code.
  7. Growing frustrated.

In more detail:

In the latest version, I had a long session with multiple steps. Suddenly, the terminal output started coming blank (Linux, bash, a common problem I’ve been experiencing for months now, several times a day), so I restarted the IDE, which is the cure for it.

What I got is that when I asked to “retry”, is that it started “Summarizing context”, then began doing something completely irrelevant, instructions from over a day ago at the beginning of the chat, but for the new code. Suddenly it was refactoring while I was implementing a new thing without any refactoring steps in my multi-step plan that I gave in the beginning.

I thought that, okay, let’s try to see if this is a bug and stop execution without reverting to the previous message to determine if this will start summarizing context on each start of the IDE.

It did, basically the same thing happened. I wonder if this is some cost-cutting effort to summarize the chat on every IDE restart. This could make sense if it worked, but it doesn’t and it’s very disruptive.

To make debugging easier, I stopped that LLM execution before it could apply any changes and asked it:
“Let’s stop here for a moment. I want you to detail what you think we are doing. We may have some miscommunication, so I want to make sure that we are on the same page.”

It started explaining the initial instructions at the top of the chat from >1d ago. My prompt to “Why not proceed with the steps as I instructed?” was interpreted as my complaint about it being overeager (it did something extra yesterday while applying that).

So, it assumes that we were near the beginning, 5th prompt: “Move the function to (…)”.