Cursor Rules Setup-First Time User

Discussions
1

I’m a first time user and confused about rules right off the bat. I watched several videos on setting up project rules but most seem to reference creating a .cursorrules file but then I also read it’s being deprecated.

So as of today, what should I be doing for first time setup? I tried to click the add new rule button but absolutely nothing happens. Do I need to first set up the project? Do I need to set up a .cursorrules file? Not sure how to activate this button to added rules.

2

For all I know this may not be best practice, but FWIW in my case I found it extremely helpful to ask Gemini (2.5 Flash if it matters) for guidance, and it guided me through creating a number of files in a [projectfolder]/.cursor/rules directory. They’re all working great and I’m very happy with the result. I never seemed to need to touch the rules features in Settings.

(YMMV since I’m still pretty new to Cursor.)