@deanrie I’m hoping you can find the best answer for this. What is the optimal structure within a cursor .mdc rule file? I ask because I’m seeing 2 very different style/formats for rules floating around right now and they are vastly different. For instance Geoffrey Huntley has a really good artic…

Hey, actually, both styles can work well. I believe that we’ll release a guide soon that will help clarify the nuances of project rules.

@doug thanks for sharing! i really like the first approach too, going to try it out!

It would be great if there were some kind of interface for rule entry/edit that optimized the process.

@deanrie also, is the cursor dev team aware 2 bugs: the the top section of the .mdc file isn’t visible? --- description: Cursor Rules Location globs: *.mdc --- so if you add a description & glob through the UI, it won’t show up in the file, if you manually add those lines, you have duplicates po…

sharing in this topic @bmadcode topic on creating rules - I’m going to check it out this weekend. After watching his video it appears he’s solved issue #2 that I noted above around properly saving files via the agent which is really exciting. He’s also extended the filenaming structure that’s becom…

Thanks Doug - one thing to point out - getting rid of the extra fields in the front matter is needed to solve most isues ppl run into with conflicts on auto rule generation - have updated the repo and suggestion to only have description and globs in the front matter. yaml fields

Posting here for rule hackers: Agent does not see subdirectories of .cursor/rules. You can ask Agent to verify: ‘what are your available rules? Do not execute code base search.’

[image] doug: I ask because I’m seeing 2 very different style/formats for rules floating around right now and they are vastly different. This also confused me very much! I ended up embracing the simpler format of markdown file with globs: frontmatter and wrote a little prompt to generate them…

Optimal structure for .mdc rules files

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doug (Doug) February 25, 2025, 6:41pm 9

This post resolves the .mdc editor issues

Topic		Replies	Views
My Best Practices for MDC rules and troubleshooting Guides	13	16606	May 21, 2026
Project Rules: Documented RULE.md folder format not working, only undocumented .mdc format works Bug Reports java	16	1175	January 13, 2026
Can anyone help me use this new .cursor/rules functionality? Help	23	9911	February 25, 2025
Created a collection of 879 .mdc Cursor Rules files for you all Built for Cursor	6	9307	March 25, 2025
Documentation Page - Schema undocumented for rules Bug Reports rules , docs	9	438	February 11, 2026

Optimal structure for .mdc rules files

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