Cursor Rules not working anymore

[Francis_Victor_Fajar (Francis Victor Fajardo)]

Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

Cursor IDE

Describe the Bug

Im trying to get Conciseness.mdc to show up in Cursor’s active rules so it’s actually applied. Things that often fix that:
Reload Cursor IDE
Doesnt work
Disable Enable
Doesnt Work

My version is 2.4.31 Early access

Steps to Reproduce

Add new rule - Conciseness - Set to always applied

Expected Behavior

Must be visible in Active rules in the agent box but still not there

Screenshots / Screen Recordings

Operating System

Windows 10/11

Version Information

Version: 2.4.31 (user setup)
VSCode Version: 1.105.1
Commit: 3578107fdf149b00059ddad37048220e41681000
Date: 2026-02-08T07:42:24.999Z
Build Type: Stable
Release Track: Early Access
Electron: 39.2.7
Chromium: 142.0.7444.235
Node.js: 22.21.1
V8: 14.2.231.21-electron.0
OS: Windows_NT x64 10.0.26100

For AI issues: which model did you use?

All

Does this stop you from using Cursor

No - Cursor works, but with this issue

[deanrie]

Hey, thanks for the report. I can see in the screenshot that your Conciseness rule isn’t showing up in Active Rules. Only the Distribution test rule (added by Cursor) is visible.

This looks like a known issue. Rules with alwaysApply: true don’t load correctly when using Auto mode or the Composer 1 model.

Workaround for now: try switching to a specific model instead of Auto, like Claude Sonnet, GPT 5.2-Codex, or Gemini 3 Flash. With those, the rules should apply correctly.

The team is aware of the issue. There’s no ETA yet, but your report helps us prioritize it.

[bladerunner2020 (Alexander Pivovarov)]

I am rephrasing my comment that was hidden: I think it’s unfair that users of the Auto mode are unable to use the rules, and the suggested workaround requires paying extra.

[nedcodes (Ned Cole)]

ran into something similar when testing rules recently. a few things i noticed:

• rules created through the UI seemed to stick better than ones manually dropped as .mdc files
• if the frontmatter format is slightly off (missing newline after closing ---, wrong field names) cursor silently ignores the file with no error
• restarting cursor sometimes helps, sometimes doesn’t

what version are you on? and are you creating through the UI or manually?