Back-office agents don't look at the rules

Bug Reports
1

Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

Background Agent (GitHub, Slack, Web, Linear)

Describe the Bug

The background agent doesn’t pay attention to the rules I define under ‘.cursor/rules’.

Steps to Reproduce

A project with more than a dozen rules was opened, and a rule asked him to add a sentence before each chat, only to find out that he couldn’t say it

Operating System

MacOS

Current Cursor Version (Menu → About Cursor → Copy)

Version: 1.9.0-pre.2.patch.0 (user setup)
Commit: 1.99.3
Date: 2c68a0136322d6944de6f75556127ae683790860
Electron: 2025-10-21T08:31:09.849Z
ElectronBuildId: 34.5.8
Chromium: undefined
Node.js: 132.0.6834.210
V8: 20.19.1
OS: 13.2.152.41-electron.0

Does this stop you from using Cursor

Sometimes - I can sometimes use Cursor

2

Hey, thanks for the report. This is a known issue, the Background Agent runtime isn’t currently loading configuration from .cursor/ directories (including both /rules and /commands).

A couple of quick questions to clarify:

  • Do your rules work correctly in regular Agent mode (non-Background Agent)?
  • Which specific rule isn’t being followed (for example, what should the agent say before each chat)?

The team is aware and investigating. For now, you can temporarily paste critical rules directly into the Background Agent prompt as a workaround.

Also note you’re on a pre-release version (1.9.0-pre.2.patch.0) it might be worth testing on the stable release to see if the issue persists.

3
  1. Yes
  2. Like I know that I am in a dedicated sandbox environment and cannot operate the real release process.
1 Like
4

Excuse me, has the background agent or cloud proxy been upgraded now? I guess this should have nothing to do with my software version, as I usually use background proxies on my phone through web pages. @deanrie

5

No updates yet, the issue is still being investigated by the team.

6

Adding that my team is seeing this as well with linear triggered background agents and I saw other discussions mentioning linear.

1 Like
7

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