Why does it feel like I go down rabbitholes so easily in Cursor?

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this is all claude 3.5 cursor and claude 3.5 claude web UI.

It gave me a requirements.txt and picked all the versions. I realized it didn’t “organically” pick the versions so I wanted to redo it.

me:

so delete requirements.txt

and give me the terminal commands to install them one by one, getting the current version

cursor:

(deleted ok)
pip install --upgrade numpy | cat

me:

pause. I’m supposed to be saving these to requirements.txt as I go

cursor:

Ah yes, you’re absolutely right! Let’s capture the exact versions as we install them. I’ll show you how to install and save to requirements.txt in one go.

pip install --upgrade numpy && pip freeze | grep -i "numpy==" >> requirements.txt

so why are we… using >> requirements.txt here.

using claude 3.5 directly it goes

me:

take a look at these imports

#!/usr/bin/env python3* """ Word2Vec training script with multiple tokenization options """ *import* argparse *import* os *import* time *import* logging *from* typing *import* List, Optional, Union, Callable *import* multiprocessing *import* nltk *from* nltk.tokenize *import* word_tokenize *import* numpy *as* np *from* gensim.models *import* Word2Vec *import* tiktoken

help me create a requirements.txt for them

claude: creates it without versions, then gives me versions

me: don’t you normally install them then save them into requirements.txt or something

claude:

# Create and activate a virtual environment (optional but recommended)
python3 -m venv myenv
source myenv/bin/activate  # On Windows, use `myenv\Scripts\activate`

# Install the packages
pip install numpy gensim nltk tiktoken

# Generate requirements.txt
pip freeze > requirements.txt

and then

# Create a new virtual environment
python3 -m venv myenv
source myenv/bin/activate

# Install all requirements
pip install -r requirements.txt

so THAT’S right.

I keep getting this experience in cursor. a lot of depth-first missing-the-point. I’m getting better prompting into claude directly either 3.5 or 3.7.

Version: 0.46.11
VSCode Version: 1.96.2
Commit: ae378be9dc2f5f1a6a1a220c6e25f9f03c8d4e10
Date: 2025-03-07T06:43:50.208Z
Electron: 32.2.6
Chromium: 128.0.6613.186
Node.js: 20.18.1
V8: 12.8.374.38-electron.0
OS: Darwin arm64 23.6.0