Cursor Rules: Setup, Best Practices, and Examples

Cursor Rules are reusable instructions that supply coding agents with project conventions, stack knowledge, and standards that language models do not retain between sessions, helping prevent issues such as incorrect file placement or outdated patterns. The current preferred format is version-controlled Project Rules stored as individual `.mdc` files in `.cursor/rules/`, while legacy `.cursorrules` files are being deprecated; Cursor also supports personal User Rules, centrally enforced Team Rules, and plain `AGENTS.md` or `CLAUDE.md` instruction files. Rules can apply always, attach to matching files through glob patterns, load intelligently based on descriptive relevance, or be invoked manually, with Team Rules taking precedence over Project and User Rules when conflicts arise. Effective rules are short, concrete, narrowly scoped, maintained alongside code, and focused on mistakes the agent repeatedly makes, while debugging should first verify file extensions, activation settings, glob matches, and contextual relevance. The guide distinguishes rules, which provide standing constraints, from skills, which package longer multi-step workflows and can include scripts and other assets; Cursor can migrate description-driven rules into skills when appropriate. Although rules can encourage secure practices such as authorization checks and parameterized SQL, they remain prompts rather than enforcement mechanisms, so runtime testing, scanning, hooks, and other automated controls are needed to verify that generated code is actually secure.

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