Where does the bug appear (feature/product)? Cursor IDE Describe the Bug Our whole org woke up to broken AI. After some investigation, it was determined that Cursor lost the ability to follow symlinks in the .cursor/rules/ directory. In our monorepo, rules are defined elsewhere (ai/system_prompts/)…

I am also facing the same issue. symlinked files are no longer being read by the read_file tool, in general, and custom .mdc rules that were symlinks are no longer being loaded into context. This is a majour feature reversion.

Thanks for the report, I’ve raised it with the team.

Additional info. The rules still show up in the rules GUI, and they show up as “active rules” in the text box. Also… maybe it was just fixed? Seeing different behavior right now.

It was working again, but now it’s totally broken again. The rules don’t even show up in the GUI anymore.

If anybody needs a workaround, you can do this in your .vscode/tasks.json: { "version": "2.0.0", "tasks": [ { "label": "Sync Cursor Rules", "type": "shell", "command": "mkdir -p .cursor/rules && rsync -a --delete ai/system_prompts/ .cursor/rules/"…

Cursor no longer can follow symlinks to rules .mdc files

Support Bug Reports

Colin (Colin) February 20, 2026, 5:21pm 10

This has been fixed in 2.5!

Rules in a symlinked subfolder (.mdc) are not followed (again)

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Cursor no longer can follow symlinks to rules .mdc files

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