The question is in the title. It’s currently unclear when we should use skills over rules and vice versa. Are skills a replacement for Cursor rules? If not, why?

Rules are working Skills are not Your welcome :smiling_face_with_sunglasses::+1:

I’m worried that skills and rules in the Cursor harness will just waste tokens for nothing, especially with sub-agents, skills, and other added features. We also don’t currently know the context size of the Cursor harness. I think the Cursor team should allow users to opt out of features that aren’…

[image] Antoine Cormouls: I’m worried that skills and rules in the Cursor harness will just waste tokens for nothing You can see this in the chat indicator. My User Rules are ~1.4k tokens + ~2k tokens usually added as a system prompt and context from indexing. For a context window containing …

[image] Artemonim: Rules are working Skills are not To be clear, this is specific to subagents, who don’t automatically learn skills. [image] Antoine Cormouls: The question is in the title. It’s currently unclear when we should use skills over rules and vice versa. Are skills a replacem…

@Colin Sorry, it’s unclear whether the “Apply intelligently” cursor rule should be migrated to skills so the model will use it more effectively ? [image]

Skills are always applied intelligently, so no need to put this in the frontmatter (it won’t do anything). Also, if you haven’t seen it, there’s a command to migrate skills to rules .

@Colin What is the real benefit of migrating? Has the Cursor harness changed, making the use of skills more appropriate than intelligently applied Cursor rules? Or do skills behave exactly the same and mainly exist for interoperability across AI IDEs and CLIs?

What is the difference between skills and rules?

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Artemonim (Artemonim) January 24, 2026, 2:40am 3

Rules are working
Skills are not

Your welcome

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What is the difference between skills and rules?

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