How to Vibe Code Without Burning Your Context Window: A Cross-Tool Setup Guide for Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and Antigravity
If you've spent any time with AI coding tools, you've likely noticed the quality drop that happens somewhere in the middle of a long session — responses get vaguer, suggestions drift further from your actual codebase, and the AI seems to "forget" conventions you established an hour ago. This is context accumulation, and it's the single biggest daily productivity drain that working with tools like Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor produces. Bibek Poudel's new deep-dive on Medium is the most thorough cross-tool guide published so far on how to fight it.
The core insight is both simple and underappreciated: every major AI coding tool supports some form of project-level memory file — CLAUDE.md, .cursorrules, and their equivalents — that loads into the context window at the start of every session. By front-loading your stack, your conventions, your architectural decisions, and your preferences into these files, you give the AI a running start rather than waiting for it to re-infer everything from scratch. The guide walks through the specific configuration for each tool and ends with a unified project structure designed to work across all four simultaneously.
The piece clocks in at around 18 minutes to read, and it earns every one of them. For anyone juggling multiple AI coding tools on the same codebase — which is increasingly how serious vibe coders work — a single afternoon spent implementing this setup is likely to pay back hours of recovered productivity per week.