Changes to ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md not captured

Support Bug Reports
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1

Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

Cursor IDE

Describe the Bug

Cursor was able to recognize ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md initially, but changes I made to CLAUDE.md AFTER that were not visible to Cursor. I tried reloading the window and starting new chats without luck.

Steps to Reproduce

  1. get the latest cursor version that can parse CLAUDE.md files
  2. let cursor parse out the ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md
  3. edit ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md
  4. check if the edits are visible in the Cursor settings (or by asking a new chat agent)

Expected Behavior

I expect the new chat agents / cursor settings to be in sync with ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md on disk.

Operating System

MacOS

Version Information

Version: 2.4.21
VSCode Version: 1.105.1
Commit: dc8361355d709f306d5159635a677a571b277bc0
Date: 2026-01-22T16:57:59.675Z
Build Type: Stable
Release Track: Default
Electron: 39.2.7
Chromium: 142.0.7444.235
Node.js: 22.21.1
V8: 14.2.231.21-electron.0
OS: Darwin arm64 25.2.0

For AI issues: which model did you use?

Opus 4.5, Composer 1

Does this stop you from using Cursor

No - Cursor works, but with this issue

3

Hey, thanks for the report.

It looks like Cursor only parses ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md on startup or first use right now. There’s no dynamic reload yet. This is a known limitation.

Try this workaround:

  • Fully quit Cursor (not just “Reload Window”)
  • Launch the app again

That should pick up the changes from CLAUDE.md.

Another option is to use .cursor/rules in your project instead of the global ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md. These rules are tracked better, and you can manage them via Settings > Rules.

Let me know if a full restart fixed it. If this is critical for your workflow, please share a bit more about how often you change CLAUDE.md and why. That’ll help us prioritize a fix.

4

Thank you for the speedy reply. It is not super critical for us right now, just an inconvenience. We make updates to ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md pretty frequently and currently manually re-applying those in Cursor via cursor settings.

FWIW I did try full restart without luck.

5

Thanks for the info. If a full restart didn’t help, that’s not expected behavior. Try a few things to troubleshoot:

  1. Open Cursor Settings > Rules. Do you see any content from ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md there at all? If yes, which one exactly, the old one or the new one?

  2. Try temporarily renaming or deleting ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md, restart Cursor, then recreate the file with the new content and restart again.

  3. Check the file permissions too. Cursor might not be able to read it.