I have some very basic ideas that I have in both user rules and memories, things like “always use our makefile ‘make test’ command to run tests”, “always put imports at the top of the file not inline in functions” and “use tenacity for retries”, but Cursor almost never follows any of them. It always tries to run tests bare metal with python cli commands, it almost always puts imports inline in functions, and it often goes way off implementing entire retry system classes from scratch instead of using our simple tenacity annotations.
Am I missing some critical step here like an on/off flag, or do Cursor rules/memories just not work? Many moons ago there was a point when .cursorrules would work most of the time, but it seems like either something was lost in the transition to the new project/user based rules and memories or there is some configuration thats default set to off so my rules aren’t even being evaluated
Steps to Reproduce
Ask for code changes that should involve rules
Expected Behavior
Follow the rules/memories
Operating System
MacOS
Current Cursor Version (Menu → About Cursor → Copy)
Hey, thanks for the report. Is this also happening in a new chat? Does this not happen with other models? Could you share the request ID? You’ll need to disable privacy mode first.
This happens for all requests I and all of my coworkers make in Cursor, as of the last few months. I don’t have any specific request ids since its all of them. I can remember to find one and share it when it happens again. I do have privacy mode off
If within a thread I correct it and tell it to “use make test to test” then it often will continue and do so for the duration of the thread, its just when I have new threads or threads where I haven’t mentioned that yet where its supposed to fallback to the rules/memories that it doesn’t work
Found an example. This one is it using pytest instead of make test which is explicitly called out in rules files. Request ID: 161efdc0-3fc0-46c1-97ca-0a634f9f6e46
I’ve been having the same issue and I am seeing that there are threads about this issue for months now with no improvements. I am constantly repeating myself when starting a new chat because it is not aware of the memories. I’ve even explicitly asked it to use my memories and the response is that the LLM doesn’t have access to a memories system.