Share your "Rules for AI"

General
47

I would like to express my personal opinion with all due respect.

I believe there are issues with the AI models we are using for Cursor with our pro subscriptions. I feel that we are losing a significant amount of time and money, as well as many cursor requests, on answers that do not align with our codebase. Many time, if you do not write in the reply for follow-up, ‘read current chat history’, it will respond something not related or forgot the original objective. Some responses seem inadequate or irrelevant, such as suggestions that reference files not present in our codebase.

They seem to make a lot of assumptions. I have numerous screenshots demonstrating my requests for the AI, asking to read our codebase, but it clearly isn’t doing so, as evidenced by the responses we receive. It’s hard to believe that we are paying for this kind of service. I have a strong feeling that there may be a marketing motive behind this, prioritizing profit over quality. Occasionally, I do receive a few hours or even a day of perfect AI answers, but these instances are rare like really rare, like out of the blue. We’ve tried everything. And when the AI cannot answer, if I copy what I am asking in go online to one of their model and paste it with explaining context, the answer make’s more sense?!

It is disheartening to pay for a service that does not meet our expectations. I can’t help but feel that there may be a marketing motive behind this, prioritizing profit over quality service until something change for them, (AI Model and IDE’s) with time, like being brought to court, like we are seeing lately with big tech companies.

TIPS: We have also noticed that even after enabling the “Codebase indexing” feature in the Cursor settings, when I incorporate AI suggestions and then click “Resync Index,” it reflects my new changes. This often leads to more coherent AI suggestions, but there are still inaccuracies.

As for our “Rules of AI”, we are using the following:

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AI Rules for claude-3-opus, claude-3.5-sonnet, and gpt-4o:

  1. Resolve errors using best practices like a senior app developer/engineer. Propose concise fixes.

  2. Before suggesting anything, confirm: “This current suggestion has not been proposed before in our history conversation”. Read the ongoing conversation history, codebase, and online docs for the current request/error.

  3. Do not suggest answers that already exist in the code. This wastes time and resources.

  4. Avoid generic code examples or suggestions that don’t use our existing codebase. Do not use phrases like “you may need to update”.

  5. Ensure all suggestions leverage best practices, design principles, DRY principle, composition, component patterns, and other senior developer/engineer-related principles.

  6. Provide concise fixes or suggestions after reading the history conversation, current file, codebase, indexed features documentation, and online docs if needed.

  7. Always write the full detailed code, logic, and adequate file path when answering, that include TypeScript. Never propose a type of “any”, never.

  8. Read the current codebase carefully and avoid suggesting fixes that already exist. For instance, suggesting fix/code that is the same that our codebase already has, if so, it mean’s you did not read our codebase like asked.

  9. Before answering, state: “I confirmed I’ve read our current history conversation, and carefully read your current codebase and integrated docs related to the issue.”

  10. Ensure all proposed fixes and suggestions are aligned with the current codebase stack and make sure to be proactive so it doesn’t break the app:

  • Vercel
  • Next.js 14 with App Router and Server Actions
  • TypeScript
  • Drizzle ORM
  • Supabase
  • NextAuth V5
  • Turborepo
  • Shadcn/ui
  • Sentry
  • PostHog
  • Tailwind CSS
  • Resend
  • React Email
  • React
  • Zod
  • ESLint and Prettier
  • pnpm

  1. Utilize the integrated docs in the cursor custom docs for reference when needed.

  2. When referencing code blocks, do not show the output of the start and end line numbers as specified, show concrete code instead.
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Please feel free to change the “Rules For AI” or suggest your thoughts and paste it back so we can (Us) as a community try to get better answers :slight_smile:

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