Cursor lacks a guided onboarding setup for AI rules. New users — especially solo developers and non-engineers — currently discover the need for .mdc rule files only after days of frustrating results.
Suggestion: add a one-time guided setup (10–15 parameters) during onboarding that generates a working .cursor/rules/ starter pack. Examples: preferred commit behavior, scope control style, hard-stop triggers, layout change treatment. Users pick what fits their workflow; Cursor generates the files.
This would significantly reduce the ‘pain tax’ every newcomer currently pays — and increase retention among non-expert users who give up before finding their footing.
Hey, thanks for the detailed feature request. The idea makes sense. New users often don’t know about rules until they hit problems, and a guided onboarding flow that generates a starter pack could help.
For now, there isn’t an onboarding wizard for this, but you can already generate rules today:
Run /create-rule right in Agent chat, describe what you want, and the agent will generate a rule file with frontmatter and save it to .cursor/rules
Go to Cursor Settings > Rules, Commands > + Add Rule to create or edit a .mdc file manually
Thanks for the reply and the link reference. Much appreciated.
It’s not that I cannot do it myself, obviously. It’s more that, e.g. coming from VS Code / Codex, I would never have thought that the same Agents.md would’t work as it had before. Cursor is working with .mdc files and must be placed in a different folder for it to actually look at it.. let alone the fact that the same instruction set also doesn’t work and needs to be rephrased for Cursor to understand and follow.
There was no warning about this, and wasted 2-3 days before I realized “Cursor cannot be this bad if I am hearing everywhere that it is now one of the best coding UIs out there” so I started to investigate why I am not getting the same (or close.. let alone better) quality as before I made the change.
Someone with less patience and time/energy would have given up after <1 day.
I get the pain. Switching from other tooling without a heads-up on differences is genuinely frustrating, especially when you lose a couple of days figuring things out.
One thing that might help for next time: Cursor now supports AGENTS.md directly, so you don’t have to rewrite everything into .mdc. Put AGENTS.md in the repo root, and it’ll be picked up as persistent instructions, alongside rules. More details here: Rules | Cursor Docs
If AGENTS.md wasn’t being picked up for you, it could’ve been due to an older Cursor version or a config detail. Share your Cursor version and where the file was located, and we can take a look.
On the discovery gap itself, the feedback that “AGENTS.md works differently out of the box, and there’s no warning about it” is totally fair. I passed that along to the team. The request for a guided setup is logged, no timeline yet, but if there’s an update I’ll reply in the thread.