This may have been intended at some point - but it is unnecessary and hampers useful functionality.
In a shared collaborative project, it is useful convention to have rules for the project that make sense for all to have / thus part of version control.
It also is useful to have rules that may be user specific. While this could be done with custom agents or in the rules for AI UI - this is not ideal because they could be personal but project specific rules - maybe a rule tied to a specific feature being worked on.
BUG: When an mdc file is gitignored - it will NOT be used by the agent, and trying to open the referenced file from the agent window if manually dragged in and clicked on ends up showing file not found.
For example - in a large project, it would be nice to have the following gitignored:
.cursor/rules/personal/*.mdc
Here the screenshots show what happens when an MDC file is gitignored:
Manually drag in the always rule (as it will never activate when git ignored and it will work only when dragged in (sometimes)
And then - clicking it in that header of the chat window results in:
