They seem so similar to me that I have a hard time choosing. All are essentially a reusable, shareable and custom prompt. AFAIK Rules are used always after the system prompt. So we should limit them to the minimal required ones to avoid repeated mistakes or code/style inconsistencies. Essentially…

Hey, great request. Here’s how they differ: Rules apply to the system prompt. There are 4 types: Always Apply (always), Apply Intelligently (the agent decides), Apply to Specific Files (by glob patterns), and Apply Manually (via @mention). They’re stored in .cursor/rules/. Commands run via / in ch…

And I forgot this one: Subagents | Cursor Docs haha

Thanks for the explanation! I would like to try out skills and subagents. How can I get the nightly build? Searching the forum revealed that night builds are not longer released

They are out now in 2.4 You can enable the nightly build in the Cursor IDE settings las section iirc

For months now I’ve been using Rules in the way that Commands are described. That is, I have rules with simple prompts like, “Make sure there are no linter warnings or type errors.” I feel like I’m not fully understanding the difference between them because using my Rules in this manner has been gr…

To my understanding you aren’t missing anything. What helps myself get through this caos is the following simplified rationale “It is all a lie. Everything is just another prompt.” Therefore your usage might not be standard or documented but can work just as fine. Not trying to be disrespectful at …

the way i think about it: rules are “how to write code” (style, patterns, constraints). commands are “do this specific task” (like a macro). skills are rules that come from external packages rather than your project. in practice they all end up as text in the system prompt, so the distinction is mo…

Given the current .mdc rules capabilities - description frontmatter field, to be precise - I’m struggling to understand how do they actually differ from skills? If I’m not wrong, both can be dynamically pulled into context based on the description. Both can have elaborate instructions and scripts/co…

I would say yes. There might be slight differences in the “read fully when a/b/c” prompt, but in the end it’s a short prompt encoding to read the longer one. All the rest is marketing to the best of my knowledge. OTH having so many overlapping features makes things complex for existing users. OTOH …

Hi everyone! We’re hosting a workshop tomorrow (March 5th) diving deeper into Cursor rules, skills, commands, hooks, and subagents - and how to choose between them. Link here to register (recording will be sent afterwards).

Skills vs. Commands [vs. Rules]

Discussions

alexandrosandre (Alexandros) January 14, 2026, 1:15pm 4

Actually

https://cursor.com/blog/agent-best-practices says

The agent can use these commands autonomously, so you can delegate multi-step workflows with a single / invocation.

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Skills vs. Commands [vs. Rules]

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