Hey, thanks for the report. This is a known issue-rules apply inconsistently, especially with glob patterns and intelligent context.
Important note: Rules with alwaysApply: false are conditional-they won’t always show in the “Active Rules” tooltip since they only trigger under specific conditions. That’s expected behavior.
Different models handle rules differently (as you noticed):
- Composer 1 often ignores conditional rules
- GPT-5.1 and Sonnet 4.5 handle them better, but not always
Workarounds for now:
- Explicitly mention key rules at the start of your request
- Use
@.cursor/rules/filename.mdcto add them manually - Simplify rules-avoid complex structures, simpler is better
Similar issue: Why does Cursor ignore rules? - simplifying rules helped
If you can, share the Request ID (chat menu > Copy Request ID) from the example where rules failed-I’ll pass it to the engineers with your test repo. Let us know what happened.