I use Claude Code on my Mac, OpenAI Codex in my terminal, Cursor in VS Code, and Hermes Agent in containers. Each tool is good at something different, but there's a brutal cost: every time I switch, my context resets.
Last week I debugged an auth issue in Claude Code. Figured out the root cause, understood the fix, saved the session with enough detail to reconstruct the reasoning. Wednesday I opened Cursor on the same code. The auth issue was still there. I re-explained it to myself from scratch, made the same wrong turns, wasted 20 minutes rediscovering a conclusion I'd already reached.
That's the tool-switching tax: brilliant insights stay locked in the tool where you had them.
Why Cross-Tool Memory Matters
Every AI coding tool keeps memory isolated by design. Your context doesn't follow you. You carry forward decisions manually, through notes or copy-paste or the optimistic fiction that you'll remember.
