CONTEXT.md – let SDKs teach Cursor how to use them

Feature request for product/service

Cursor IDE

Describe the request

AGENTS.md is great for telling Cursor how to work in this repo.

What’s missing is a standard way for SDKs and libraries to tell Cursor how to work with them – in the exact version that’s installed, not whatever the model was trained on.

I’m proposing a simple convention: CONTEXT.md files that ship with packages (or internal libs) and that Cursor’s agents can automatically discover and use as integration guides.

Think of it as:
• AGENTS.md → instructions for this project
• CONTEXT.md → instructions for this package/SDK (this version)

Problem: integrating SDKs without context.md
Today, integrating SDKs (especially less popular or internal ones) with AI help often feels clumsy:

• Version and intent mismatch: The model’s built-in knowledge of an SDK is frozen at training time, and even though Cursor can read the current SDK code, it still has no explicit, version-local guide to which APIs, patterns, and constraints are actually recommended now.

• Docs aren’t agent-friendly: READMEs and doc sites mix install steps, marketing, and noise; the “how to integrate this here” signal is buried.

• Design intent and constraints are hidden: There’s no canonical place that explains mental models, public vs internal APIs, ordering rules, or footguns, so the AI easily generates “valid but wrong” usage.

• High manual overhead: Developers keep pasting docs and re-explaining best practices to the agent on every task instead of the SDK shipping that knowledge once.

Proposal: CONTEXT.md as a package-level integration guide

Idea: let SDKs ship a small CONTEXT.md file that Cursor treats as high-value context when working with that package.

Typical contents:
• Mental model and core concepts
• Common tasks and recommended flows
• Do/Don’t rules and anti-patterns
• Version and key changes for this release
• A few short, idiomatic examples

When a user imports a package, Cursor should look for a standard file - CONTEXT.md in that package’s root directory. If found, this context is treated as High-Priority System Instructions for that specific file session.

This gives you:
• Zero-config RAG for SDKs – library maintainers write the context once; after install, users immediately get “expert” suggestions that follow the SDK’s own guidance.
• Version locking – the context is local to the installed version, reducing hallucinations from outdated training data.

Beyond Cursor: path to an industry standard

If Cursor documents and supports CONTEXT.md as a convention (next to AGENTS.md), SDK authors can:
• Write CONTEXT.md once,
• Have it work across any AI IDE or agent that adopts the same standard.

This would make CONTEXT.md a shared, tool-agnostic way for libraries to be AI-native by design.

CONTEXT.md example:


## Version
- Which version this file describes, and any key breaking changes.

## Mental model
- How to think about this SDK and its main abstractions.

## Core concepts
- Main public components/classes/modules and how they relate.

## Common tasks
- Typical tasks and which APIs/patterns to use for each.

## Do / Don’t
- ✅ Recommended patterns.
- ❌ Internal APIs, anti-patterns, and things the agent should avoid.

## Examples
- A few short, idiomatic code snippets showing the preferred usage.

I’m already experimenting with this idea in a public SDK I’m working on. You can see a real example here.

Right now my workaround has two main problems:

  1. Manual copy-paste: The SDK user has to manually copy the file (or its contents) into Cursor for the agent to use it.

  2. Naming / priority issues with AGENTS.md : If the user drops my AGENTS.md into the folder where they’re integrating the SDK, Cursor will treat it as the closest AGENTS file and apply those instructions to that work, even though they’re really SDK-specific, not project-level. If I keep AGENTS.md inside the SDK folder, then my AI agents use it during SDK development – but in that context I also need other instructions (test rules, commit rules, etc.), so it doesn’t really fit.