Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?
Cursor IDE
Describe the Bug
In the “Rules, Skills, Subagents” section there is a toggle that says. “Include third-party Plugins, Skills and other configs”. When this enabled, skills and CLAUDE.md files are correctly loaded, but it does not show rules that are part of the .claude/rules directory
Steps to Reproduce
Create a rule in the .claude/rules project directory with “.md” extension and enable the toggle. The rule is not applied to the agent when it should be.
Expected Behavior
The rule should be added to the rules list and applied.
Screenshots / Screen Recordings
Operating System
MacOS
Version Information
Version: 3.0.4
VSCode Version: 1.105.1
Commit: 63715ffc1807793ce209e935e5c3ab9b79fddc80
Date: 2026-04-02T09:36:23.265Z
Layout: editor
Build Type: Stable
Release Track: Default
Electron: 39.8.1
Chromium: 142.0.7444.265
Node.js: 22.22.1
V8: 14.2.231.22-electron.0
OS: Darwin arm64 25.4.0
For AI issues: which model did you use?
claude-4-sonnet
Does this stop you from using Cursor
No - Cursor works, but with this issue
There may also be a general problem with .md files being ignored as rules from the rule list. I tired moving my rule to the .cursor/rules dir and since it is an .md and not a .mdc it does not show up in the list either.
The “Include third-party Plugins, Skills and other configs” toggle picks up CLAUDE.md and .claude/skills/, but .claude/rules/ isn’t a supported location for project rules. For rules, use the .cursor/rules/ directory instead.
Regarding the .md file not showing up: rules in .cursor/rules/ need to use the .mdc extension. Rename checkstyle.md to checkstyle.mdc, and it should appear in the list. More details here: Rules
Thats fair that it is not fully supported but it would make sense to extend the “Include third-party Plugins, Skills and other configs” to include .claude/rules as the skills are already supported. This seems like an inconsistent behavior to include one and not the other.
The following doc rule structure does show that .md should be supported. It also seems like .md are not be followed.
https://cursor.com/docs/rules#rule-file-structure
Hi @mohitjain thank you very much for the clarification.
Based on the discussion, for a team who’ve already fully configured for Claude, looking to explore Cursor,
the walkarounds I see are,
- duplicate the files in
.claude/rules/ and rename them to have mdc extension.
- creating proxy files in
.cursor/rules/ mirroring the structure .clauderules/
Do you see any other avenue we can take, or recommendations?
Also, is this something you plan to fix soon?
The workarounds you’ve outlined are the right approach. The simplest path is to copy your .claude/rules/ files into .cursor/rules/, and rename them with the .mdc extension. The content format is the same – you can optionally add frontmatter (for description and globs) at the top, but it’s not required.
If your team uses both Claude Code and Cursor, maintaining both directories is the way to go for now. There’s no symlink or auto-sync mechanism between them. I don’t have a timeline to share on broader .claude/rules/ support.
