The friction isn't the editorI switched between Cursor, Cline, and Claude Code in the same week recently. The learning c...

The friction isn't the editorI switched between Cursor, Cline, and Claude Code in the same week recently. The learning curve on each tool was fine. What actually ate my time was re-explaining the project to each one.Same repo layout. Same test command. Same "don't touch that file." Same "the auth flow lives here, not there." I'd paste it into Cursor, watch it build the right thing, switch to Cline for a different task, and start from zero again. The tool remembered nothing about the project. I was the clipboard.That's the tax nobody budgets for: not the tool's learning curve, but the per-tool re-explanation. Each tool wants its own fileCursor reads .cursorrules. Claude Code reads CLAUDE.md. Cline reads its own instructions. A bunch of other tools read AGENTS.md because it's the closest thing to a cross-vendor convention anyone has.If you maintain three near-identical files, you will drift. The one that says "use pnpm" falls out of date when the repo moves to bun. The one that lists the...