Cannot edit .cursor/rules

Support Bug Reports
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1

Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

Cursor IDE

Describe the Bug

Cannot Edit .cursor/rules from both Cursor Chat and Cursor CLI via edit_file even turning off dotfile protection. It says, edit: write permission denied.
Instead, they trying to bypass the protection using command, such as node writeFile or python, which is wasting tokens and feels dangerous to me.
This is very annoying when updating cursor rules.

Steps to Reproduce

Tell Cursor Agent to add blank line in some .cursor/rules file
File editing is all failed.

Expected Behavior

Edit .cursor/rules properly. At least, they force not to use commandline. It means dotfile protection is nothing to do with security.

Operating System

MacOS

Current Cursor Version (Menu → About Cursor → Copy)

Version: 2.3.33
VSCode Version: 1.105.1
Commit: c68681c13bdb0dea7fb85526bcc3202d20233fa0
Date: 2026-01-10T01:02:28.166Z
Electron: 37.7.0
Chromium: 138.0.7204.251
Node.js: 22.20.0
V8: 13.8.258.32-electron.0
OS: Darwin arm64 25.2.0

For AI issues: which model did you use?

Any model

Additional Information

It seems that this problem have not been fixed from half a year.

Does this stop you from using Cursor

No - Cursor works, but with this issue

3

Hey, thanks for the report. This is a known issue, and the team is already working on a fix.

The Write and StrReplace tools get blocked when trying to edit .cursor/rules without showing a confirmation prompt, even though they should ask for the user’s permission.

Detailed discussion and workarounds: [BUG] AI Agent Write/StrReplace Tools Blocked on .cursor/rules/private/*.mdc Files

Temporary workaround (from the linked thread):

  1. cp .cursor/rules/file.mdc tmp_file
  2. Edit tmp_file using the agent
  3. Confirm the changes
  4. `mv tmp_file .cursor/rules/file.mdc