What is even the point of "MAX Mode"?

Ideas Feedback
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1

I turn on Max mode for GPT-5.5, and after 272k tokens, the chat context is summarized.

Great. No way to recover the incredibly-valuable context. It’s just gone.

What’s even the point of this mode? I have to click the “Edit” button and switch GPT-5.5 to 1M context anyway? This makes no sense.

4

indeed.. just went and see for myself, since those settings are saved, and you can manually activate max mode and then after set the lower context window.. it can be easy to be mislead by it, thanks for sharing this issue

5

You’re right that manually switching GPT-5.5 to 1M defeats the point of Max mode. If Max mode is on but the context setting stays at 272K, that’s not the behavior we expect.

Could you share a few details so we can narrow this down?

  1. Your Cursor version (Help > About)
  2. After you toggle Max mode on for GPT-5.5, does the Context dropdown still show 272K, or does it switch to 1M?
  3. If you manually switch Context to 1M, does it stay selected in new chats?
  4. If possible, a short screen recording showing the model picker before and after toggling Max mode

For now, manually setting Context to 1M is the right workaround.