User Rules Appearing in Context Not Visible in User Rules Interface

Bug Reports
1

Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

Cursor IDE

Describe the Bug

Old rules that have should have been deleted still appear in the AI agent’s system context and affect behavior long after they were deleted, but they are not visible or editable in the User Rules interface (Cursor Settings > Rules > User Rules).

Steps to Reproduce

  1. Open Cursor Settings > Rules > User Rules
  2. Note the rules listed there
  3. Start a new chat with the AI agent
  4. Observe AI behavior that suggests rules are active
    5.. Check User Rules interface again - the rules affecting behavior are not visible

Expected Behavior

  • All rules active in the AI context should be visible in the User Rules interface
  • Users should be able to see, edit, or remove all rules that are being applied
  • No hidden or invisible rules should affect AI behavior

Operating System

MacOS

Current Cursor Version (Menu → About Cursor → Copy)

Version: 2.1.46 Commit: ab326d0767c02fb9847b342c43ea58275c4b1680
Date: 2025-12-02T03:59:29.283Z (17 hrs ago) Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Cursor/2.1.46 Chrome/138.0.7204.251 Electron/37.7.0 Safari/537.36

Additional Information

  • Cloud-synced rules from another device?
  • System-level rules that aren’t shown in User Rules interface?
  • Rules stored in a other location not known that is not accessible or shown through the UI?

Does this stop you from using Cursor

No - Cursor works, but with this issue

2

Hey, thanks for the report. It seems there are scenarios where rules get hardcoded into the local database. Or these rules are from when they were stored locally; now they’re in the cloud. There are a few ways to remove local user rules.

Option A - Clean reinstall

  1. Fully close Cursor (make sure no Cursor/Electron processes are running).
  2. Delete user data (this resets local rules/caches and local agents will be deleted). You can export your profile if needed:
    • ~/Library/Application\ Support/Cursor/User/globalStorage/state.vscdb and state.vscdb.backup
  3. Open Cursor and go through the setup process again.

Option B - Downgrade

  1. Uninstall the current Cursor.
  2. Install the installer for the previous version; you can download old versions here: Download · Cursor
  3. If the goal is to remove old local rules: before first launch (or right after, with Cursor closed), clear the key in the DB:
    sqlite3 ~/Library/Application\ Support/Cursor/User/globalStorage/state.vscdb "DELETE FROM ItemTable WHERE key = 'aicontext.personalContext';"

Notes

  • If you don’t want to lose chat history, don’t delete the entire workspaceStorage folder; just clear the specific key aicontext.personalContext (as above).
  • After clearing the DB, User Rules come from the cloud (visible in Settings > Rules > User Rules). If the issue happens again, log out and log back in.

Let me know if this helped. If not, I’ll pass it to the team.

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