Hi @Nate_Fabian Thank you for the post.
Nothing is broken here, and this isn’t leftover cloud rules or a ghost sync.
Those seven items are Composer’s built-in session instructions (they apply to the Composer model family). They’re part of the model’s prompt, not files or account settings, so they won’t appear in Editor Settings, on cursor.sh, or in ~/.cursor/rules/, and they can’t be edited or removed there. That’s why every editable surface shows zero, but you still see the block. Easy way to confirm: switch the chat to a non-Composer model (Opus, Sonnet, or GPT) and this set disappears, since those models carry their own built-ins.
The overlap with your .mdc files is content, not source. Your filenames line up closely with these built-in categories, so it looks like the guidance maybe got copied into your own files at some point. The two are independent, and Composer already carries this guidance, so you can safely delete those .mdc duplicates.
The built in content does contribute to token usage but it’s a smaller amount typically than the bucket that contains tools, user rules, etc.
Same finding confirmed here: Composer 2.5 always on injected rules and Ghost User Rules still injected in Agent context.