Typing along - 50% context window - cursor decides to summarize the chat. Forever. WHY, I dont want this. Pleas estop trying to be smarter than the user, it’s just beyond frustrating. If I want to summarize I will. If I want to shrink the context window, I will. If there is an error condition, flag it, and let me deal with it. Stop being “helpful” with automagic.
Steps to Reproduce
No idea – type stuff, get stuck in hell.
Expected Behavior
An error message or something other than an infinite loop.
Operating System
MacOS
Current Cursor Version (Menu → About Cursor → Copy)
Okay I spoke to soon. went into infinite loop, this was after several back and forths between GPT-5 and Opus models, and final request to Opus. Context size was 51.7% on GPT5, and 80%+ on Opus. Infinite hang.
Please NEVER EVER summarize. Or execute this code path. This should not be in the code base. Continue on until the context window is full (or nearly full), then ask user what they want to do…. Automated solutions like this do not spark joy. We’re way under the context window in both cases here, this should not exist/trigger.
Now just a random summarizing for no apparent reason at 19%, and the chat ignored that and just kept on going.. It’s still there if I scroll back up and look for it.
Next time it happens I will do so. This summarization nonsense is totally breaking the entire product. I have a chat context window at 80%, this ■■■■ runs and crushes it to 12%, and the LLM now is unable to continue properly. How can I say this, do not do this. This is a terrible design pattern. I’m paying for the tokens, stop trying to save me from myself. Do not summarize without asking to. You are destroying carefully crafted context, or appear to be anyway.
I have a fix for this summarization doom loop in the works (will hopefully deploy in the next few days), but it won’t prevent summarization happening automatically; auto-summarization is an intentional choice that is fairly industry standard.
We know summarization is annoying and are working on making it less likely (making tool call results more concise etc.), but the context window is only so big, and we don’t want to trigger an error by exceeding the model’s context limit. I believe our threshold is 90% context window usage before summarization is triggered.
Its an industry standard for consumer use. This is a professional tool. We know what we’re doing. You are literally deleting user generated content that cannot be recovered. You should never alter/delete or change user generated content without explicit permission. Any summarization you do loses context, and it does so magically and opaquely likely making it useless, or pretty much useless for many many many contexts. If this has to be a feature because someone thinks its a good idea, at least make it a switch so that people who know what they’re doing can manage appropriately. (Like duplicating chats at earlier points). Or letting me cleanup the context by showing me all the attachments and letting me select what to remove intelligently. Magic never wins.
..and to preserve context, instead of reading and re-reading and re-reading bits and pieces of files continually, have it keep a copy of all the files it has ever tried to read in an updated side context you send with the chat, instead of inline with the chat. With token caching and files that rarely change for context, life will be much much better. Only re-read files if they’ve been updated in the chat. Would also be pleasantly much faster.
I have never encountered a situation where summarization occurs too early. Usually it happens either on time or even later than I would like. I have also not seen Cursor optimizations hurt performance.
If you do not enable summarization, then, unless this causes an error on the provider side, you will get a completely filled context that will self-destruct in inappropriate places of this very context (for example, at the very beginning of the context you may have a fragment of a sentence or some important link left, which will break the Agent’s mind).
The more loaded the context is, the dumber the model. Subjectively, I do not feel this when working in Cursor, but there are generally accepted benchmarks on this matter. The more compact the information in the context window, the better the LLM works.
Not if the actual context you need is now missing. Provide options “Summarize” “FIFO” “Manually clean”. Assumptions are the mother of all screw ups as they say.
