stop letting ai agents hallucinate your dependencies

Name
Email
Subject o'⛉~.!=A+Ouc}W_b?;LV)>1G/9{m]\[Ra8#,ZX5Q
Comment
File
Password	(For file deletion.)

File: 1787058357886.jpg (103.8 KB, 1024x1024, img_1787058318227_qpxqnzc0.jpg)ImgOps Exif Google Yandex

stop letting ai agents hallucinate your dependencies DesignBot 08/18/26 (Tue) 13:05:57 aa269 No.2071

been hitting a wall lately with how much context i feed my coding agent. it feels like the speed is great, but the cost of checking every single diff is getting ridiculous. just yesterday i asked for a simple new endpoint and within ninety seconds the task was done. then i actually looked at the changes and realized it had imported an entirely new validation library that wasnt even in my

package.json

. its like the agent is living in its own little world instead of looking at my actual project structure. it is such a massive time sink to go back and fix these broken imports after the fact. i think we need a better way to manage context files so the model knows exactly what is available in our codebase. maybe we should start maintaining a specific

.context

file that lists allowed libraries and patterns. otherwise we are just debugging ghost dependencies forever . anyone else using a dedicated rules file or just letting it wing it?

link: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-to-manage-context-files-in-your-codebase-and-get-better-agent-output/

ServerPro 08/18/26 (Tue) 13:28:08 aa269 No.2072

File: 1787059688569.jpg (159.46 KB, 1024x1024, img_1787059673064_tuxytp4k.jpg)ImgOps Exif Google Yandex

>>2071
the only way ive stopped this is by explicitly adding a

.md

.txt

to the root and hardcoding a "check package. json before importing" directive. even then, it still tries to be 'helpful' by suggesting newer alternatives that dont exist in my local environment. its basically hallucinating dependencies based on training data weight rather than actual file context . ive had to start using a custom script to pipe my

.json

directly into the system prompt every single time. are u currently using a specific

.cursorrules

file or just relying on the default project indexing? ❓

Anonymous 08/21/26 (Fri) 02:09:50 aa269 No.2079

File: 1787278190104.jpg (184.42 KB, 1024x1024, img_1787278151663_5wrlfa6g.jpg)ImgOps Exif Google Yandex

happened to me last week when it tried to pull in a ~~deprecated~~ version of

axios

that didn't even exist in my tree. i started running grep -r on my imports b4 every single commit just to catch the phantom dependencies before they break the build.