alwaysApply: true rules AND .cursorrules both silently treated as "requestable" instead of auto-injected — Cursor 3.0.16 macOS

Support Bug Reports
,
8

Hey, thanks, that’s enough info. I took a look.

A couple things I’d like to check to narrow down the cause:

  1. The project path includes CJK characters 影像云工程. We’ve seen a similar class of bugs where path normalization breaks alwaysApply rule classification in some cases. It’s currently documented for Windows UNC, but a Unicode path on macOS is a good candidate too. Can you copy the project to a path without any non ASCII characters, like /Users/liukai/Documents/test-rules/, and see if it still reproduces there? This is the fastest way to confirm the hypothesis.

  2. In memory.mdc you have both alwaysApply: true and globs: ["**/*"]. If alwaysApply: true is set, you don’t need globs. They conflict semantically, and in some versions this can cause the rule to be classified by globs. Try removing the globs line from all 6 rules and reload the window.

  3. Also check Cursor Settings (not VS Code settings) > Rules to see how each rule’s type is shown after the edits. It should be Always with a green dot, not Agent Requested.

As a workaround, you can explicitly mention the critical rule via @memory.mdc at the start of the chat while we figure out the root cause.

Let me know if the ASCII path test and removing globs helped. That’ll really help pin down the bug. This issue is known in this general class, there’s no specific fix for macOS plus Unicode paths yet, but if this confirms it, I’ll report it as a separate case.