Got it, thanks for clarifying. Interesting detail: in a related thread Cursor settings don’t list or reflect active user rules and plugins the bug was the other way around. The Settings UI didn’t show the rules, but the agent still applied them. In your case it’s the opposite. Settings sees them, the agent ignores them.
There’s a similar report on the latest 3.0.16: alwaysApply: true rules AND .cursorrules both silently treated as "requestable" instead of auto-injected — Cursor 3.0.16 macOS rules with alwaysApply: true silently turn into requestable instead of being auto injected. It might be the same kind of bug.
To narrow it down, I need:
- Request ID: open a new chat in Agents Window, send any message, then open the chat context menu top right corner and pick Copy Request ID.
- When you open Agents Window, are you opening a specific project as a workspace, or does the agent start from your home directory?
- In the Agents Window chat there’s an Active Rules indicator. Can you check what it shows?
For now, the best workaround is using User Rules via the UI: Cursor Settings > Rules. It’s not the file based workflow, but it works reliably in both the IDE and Agents Window.
The team is aware of this class of rules issues in Glass. Your report helps us pin down the exact boundaries of the bug. Let me know the details for the points above.