This has got to be the most frustrating part of Cursor: [image] If we can’t trust it to use our rules how can we rely on any output? Is there some trick I can implement to make this more reliable?

No trick that I have found, in fact what I have found is it consistently uses the greeting in my rules and ignores the rest. Seems like it’s part of the smoke and mirrors game it plays to make you think its using the rules. I can confirm, it doesn’t use 90+% of them on a consistent basis. I have rem…

I’ve also noticed this happening a lot. It seems most of the time lately the models totally ignore any rules I’ve set for the project or globally. Occasionally I’ve noticed “Auto” will select a model that actually obeys the provided rules (pretty sure it’s selecting GPT4o) but otherwise it seems lik…

I have found a few things (as of cursor 0.47) with sonnet 3.5 and 3.7: Agent Select Rules have a pretty good hit rate of getting picked up, but require tuning of the description to really make it effective and more consistent. Auto Select rule - these are still hit or miss for some reason - I woul…

Someone I know, attempted to jailbreak the system rules which Cursor pass in alongside our rules. I don’t know how accurate it was, there was things about it being concise and reducing tokens. But interestingly, it did also give it leeway to not always follow the request to the letter. I assume this…

I was thinking about that today also - there is something with cursor where even when it picks up the rule file, sometimes the LLM seems to randomly choose from within the same file some rules to follow and some not. Of course everything with the LLM is nondeterministic - but sometimes what it decid…

I have determined through trial-and-error (and asking models about the contents of their prompts) that there is a local model deciding which rules are important enough to include. Having “Always” selected is not enough, if you have more than one “Always” rule. Once I added “very-important” or “mus…

You really should have a bunch of .mdc files and tag which ever ones are needed. Until the day comes when we can have a 100x the context window, we will have to continue to tag each rule and make double check the agents work

Cursor consistently, reliably, ignores rules, even when there is just a single .mdc file set to apply to “All requests”. For example, a straightforward instruction to use a specific conda environment, and never use the the system python, is arbitrarily ignored. It is a daily challenge.

Check out this post: [image] Ai to Read Docs Vs. Conversation How To Everyday I begin each Cursor session with having Cursor AI read specific documentation I’ve created for the part of the project I am working on. I’ve noticed that when I have Ai read the documentation, it…

Cursor just ignores rules

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its-tim-lee (TL) April 8, 2025, 3:44pm 8

may relate to #Please make "thinking toggle" visible

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Topic		Replies	Views
Cursor Does Not Respect Rules Bug Reports	9	469	September 28, 2025
Cursor isn't strictly enforcing the rules Feedback	11	775	July 31, 2025
Cursor actively admitting that rules are meaningless, and it doesn't have to follow them Help	10	528	September 27, 2025
Cursor ignores project rules Bug Reports	4	180	December 3, 2025
Cursor ignoring .cursorrules Bug Reports rules	15	173	March 5, 2026

Cursor just ignores rules

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