Why My Claude-4-sonnet Was Stuck ‘Generating’ for Days and How I Fixed It in Cursor IDE

I was deep into an AI project using Claude-4-sonnet in Cursor IDE when it suddenly froze on “generating”… for two whole days. Deadlines were closing in, so I needed a fix that wouldn’t wipe my progress. Here’s how I unstuck it.

My Strange Freeze-Out

Running Cursor Version 0.50.7 on MacOS 15.5, Claude-4-sonnet just stopped responding overnight. Even simple questions triggered endless spinning or blank screens.

Restarting Cursor did nothing. Switching modes changed nothing. The weirdest part? This only happened in one project – other projects on the same Mac worked fine.

My Failed Fix Attempts

• Restarted Cursor repeatedly and launched new chats
• Stripped conversations down to single-sentence queries
• Toggled between Agent and Manual modes
• Tested on another MacBook – worked perfectly there

After hours wasted, I felt stuck. Nothing made sense.

Finding Clues in DevTools

Out of ideas, I opened DevTools: right-clicked the chat window and selected “Inspect”.

After running console.clear(), I triggered a fresh query. No obvious errors appeared, but I noticed something crucial – the hang only affected this specific project environment.

How I Fixed It

1. Duplicated the project: Copied everything in Cursor instead of reinstalling (saved all my files!)
2. Re-fed chat history: Added screenshots of recent conversations to rebuild context
3. Tested interactions: Sent new queries in the cloned project – Claude responded normally within minutes

The relief was real. I was coding again without reinstalling or losing work.

How to Prevent This From Happening Again

• Duplicate projects before troubleshooting – your future self will thank you
• Check DevTools early when things feel slow – watch the Network tab especially
• Add context gradually – huge info dumps increase freeze risks