Questions regarding Agent Skills and its relationship with .cursorrules

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Hey! I’ll answer your questions:

  1. Official release: Agent Skills isn’t ready to use yet. Even though the feature was added to the docs, the team confirmed it “wasn’t quite ready for primetime”. There’s no ETA yet. Please watch the forum for updates.

  2. Agent Skills vs .cursorrules: These are different mechanisms:

  • Agent Skills is an open standard for portable, reusable agent skills. They work like “agent-decided rules”, meaning the agent decides when to apply a skill based on context. They’re defined in SKILL.md files.
  • .cursorrules (Rules) provide system-level instructions for the Agent. They support 4 apply modes: Always Apply, Apply Intelligently, Apply to Specific Files, Apply Manually. They’re defined in .cursor/rules/RULE.md.
  1. When to use:
  • Agent Skills for portable, reusable skills that work across different projects
  • Rules for project-specific context, coding standards, and workflow
  1. Replacement: No, they’re designed to coexist and serve different purposes.

I’d also recommend checking out Hooks (Hooks | Cursor Docs), a system to control the agent loop using scripts.

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