Tighten context, drop the politeness

Give the agent one well-scoped task and only the files relevant to it; broad context turns a specialist into a generalist. In Cursor, use "Reference Open Editors" to control context and avoid pollution from logs. Notably, dropping filler words like "please"/"help" in coding prompts avoids triggering "helpful assistant mode" where the model favors a quick answer over precise instruction-following.

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Sources: The Excited Engineer