Rules vs. Memories and Global vs. Project

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tl;dr: The docs say: Memories are automatically generated rules based on your conversations in Chat. These memories are scoped to your project and maintain context across sessions.

I don’t believe it’s true. I think memories are global. Otherwise I shouldn’t see them in the Settings UI when on different projects.

Today I found out that I had a ton of “memories” for Cursor, but they were applied at a global level. All those memories were very project-specific. (And Cursor added them, not me doing it manually, though I did approve them when asked.)

My problem is this: I found a solution (somehow… Google or AI or whatever) about a .cursor/learned_memories.mdc file. And, indeed, my project seems to recognize them.

The problems, though, IMO, are the following:

  • The settings UI for memories and rules doesn’t show any project-based memories. (So that’s 3 of 4 areas, that show, with one “missing”.)
  • The global memories, the User Rules (global I assume) and Project Rules, are all UI-style “add”, “edit”, “delete”. This could be VASTLY improved by allowing that style, but also allowing the user to edit the files directly, much like you can with adding/editing MCP servers. You say “add” and you just get the whole file. Which is fine, but definitely helps if there’s a “template” in there, at least for the rules, or some help file on how to format the content.

I would very much like to be able to open the FOUR files (that’s Global Rules, Project rules, Global Memories and Project Memories) to edit them. I tried to go down a path of getting the AI to build a global rule to ask me for any new rule or memory addtion if a) it’s okay to do so and b) is it global or project based. If it could do that then I would’ve avoided a huge mess of these files. (And would’ve helped me avoid the hassle of wondering why my SQL Server project was trying to use sqlite that was only for another project.)

And if any Cursor dev is reading this, also consider that projects can be Workspaces or Folders. Or workspaces with separate folders that are “added”. I’m trying to do more “folder-based”, but my biggest work client has two repos that work together, so… two folders added to a workspace.

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it’s obviously a screw-up.

The “memories” feature must be project-specific and it is not.

While the (cursor) settings UI clearly shows “Project Rules” it does not such section for “Project memories”. this is a real screw up from whoever is the project manager over there.