What do you guys thing of the new Team Rules feature?
its nice that admin can enable/force rules in the cursor admin dashboard , but im aiming for more collaboration with the developers.
at LSports, we opened an organization-level cursor-rules repo that’s linked to our custom VSCode extension. this way, everyone stays synced with rule updates, and we can collect feedback and PRs for adding or changing rules.
How do you share and manage rules in your workplace?
Currently, my team also has a repository of Cursor Rules w/ a custom distribution tool that allows subsets to be pulled in per-repository.
The Team Rules feature as it stands has two major shortcomings that prevent it from replacing this tool:
No “Activation Criteria”
Cursor Rules’ killer feature over CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.md is the conditional application. Team Rules are always in context which means the great, bespoke rule for how to do React our way (for example), can’t be distributed as a Team Rule because it would take up context for many people who don’t use React (we can’t put the *.js, *.ts, etc, globs in a Team Rule). Similarly, the “how we structure our Helm charts” rule can’t be provided as a Team rule because it will take up context for the React devs unless they know to go turn it off!
Opt-out or Mandatory, no Opt-in
Unless I am missing something, an “enabled” rule is on by default for all team members, but they can choose to turn it off (opt-out). Mandatory rules just can’t be turned off.
However, this also prevents offering a library of optional rules (opt-in) to team members, as EVERY rule will activate and take up context by default. No only does this likely waste context, but any mutually-exclusive rules can’t be offered as they’ll BOTH be active!
Example: Opening a GitHub Pull Request “the right way” - using GitHub MCP versus using gh CLI (depending on which a dev has set up or prefers). I want to offer both of those as independent optional rules, but I cannot have BOTH sets of guidance in effect at once or else the agents’ behavior is much-less predictable. Therefore, I cannot use Team Rules to deliver them.
It turns out that the set of rules my team has that are truly always-applicable to all developers in all prompts is really, really small - only 1 rule at best! And even that one is better-off as an agent-requested rule because it has a very obviously-defined activation criteria.
So, for now, we aren’t yet using Team Rules at all.
Hello! Are you able to use Team rules at all? We are testing using them in our organization for security purposes, we have a set of rules that utilize an MCP server and must always scan generated code in this way. It works if supplied as user rules, but when trying to supply them as Team Rules in the Cursor Admin dashboard, although we create them, we cannot see them in Cursor Desktop neither they are applied in the chat. Is anyone experiencing issues with Cursor not applying Team rules in Cursor desktop? Currently trying in MacOS. Thanks!
you are 100% correct, this is why we are going to use the team rules only for mandatory rules - security rules, to be enforced to everyone.
the other rules should still be in our cursor-rules repo, for our developers to be able to if contribute (as sort of open-source) and to save the rules somewhere, if we’ll need to change vendor.
i will let you know if we’re having those problems. try to seek cursor team help.
the team rules is a working in process, so they probably will change it a lot.
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