unpopular opinion: cursor and claude code arent getting dumber, their agent loops are structurally blind and suffocating your context window

Im honestly so tired of the "bro u just need to prompt better" crowd when talking about coding agents churning out slop after 20 turns. i finally sat down and audited my api logs and prompt payloads this week bc my token usage was off the charts and i realized something that drove me actually crazy. the models (even the big ones) arent degrading or getting lobotomized. they are literally just suffocating on their own bloated context windows before they even attempt to do any actual reasoning.