Cursor 2.5+ project rules discovery causes infinite CPU usage in repos with circular symlinks

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1

Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

Cursor IDE

Describe the Bug

In Cursor 2.5+, two rg processes are spawned on workspace open to discover AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, and .cursor/rules/**/*.mdc files. These processes use --follow (follow symlinks) with a hardcoded exclusion list, but do not respect search.followSymlinks: false, .cursorignore, or any user-configurable setting.

In repositories that use circular/self-referential symlinks (e.g. assemblies/topic-name/assemblies → ../../assemblies/, a common pattern in modular documentation repos), the --follow flag causes infinite directory recursion. The two rg processes each consume ~480% CPU indefinitely and never terminate, making Cursor unusable.

Exact rg invocations (from ps aux):

rg --files --hidden --no-require-git --no-config --color=never --follow \
  --iglob */**/AGENTS.md --iglob */**/CLAUDE.md --iglob */**/CLAUDE.local.md \
  --iglob !**/node_modules/** --iglob !**/.git/** ...

rg --files --hidden --no-require-git --no-config --color=never --follow \
  --iglob */**/.cursor/rules/**/*.mdc \
  --iglob !**/node_modules/** --iglob !**/.git/** ...

Suggested fixes (any of these would work):

  • Honor the existing search.followSymlinks: false setting – don’t pass --follow when it’s disabled.
  • Pass --ignore-file=.cursorignore so users can control what’s scanned.
  • Use rg’s built-in --max-depth to cap recursion depth, since AGENTS.md / .cursor/rules/ files are never deeply nested.
  • At minimum, detect and break symlink cycles (rg does not do this itself when --follow is used).

Workaround: Creating a .ignore file (respected natively by rg) in the repo root with patterns like assemblies/**/assemblies to break the circular chains. This works because the invocations do not include --no-ignore.

Steps to Reproduce

Open any repo containing circular directory symlinks in Cursor 2.5+ and observe with ps aux | grep rg. Cursor 2.4.37 does not exhibit this behavior.

Operating System

MacOS

Version Information

2.6.19 , but any 2.5+ seems to exhibit this

Does this stop you from using Cursor

Yes - Cursor is unusable

6

Sorry for the late reply on this one, @dvozenil!

I was able to reproduce this issue and I’ve filed a bug report. Using an .ignore file is a good workaround for now and I appreciate you sharing it!

I can follow up here if there are any updates on the bug ticket.

8

Thanks, let me know if possible! Hopefully this can get fixed in a future release, although the workaround seems to work perfectly for now.