Cursor Rules Overview

Portable quickref for Cursor's projected rules: always-on repo behavior is compact, while canonical routing and long-form policy stay in the wiki.

Open this page when Cursor behavior seems stale, a rule needs syncing, or a new rule/projection is being added. Canonical routing map: Agent Operations Hub.

Rule Layers

Layer Path Role
Global Cursor rules config/cursor/rules/ -> ~/.cursor/rules Always-on brain-first, quality, no-one-off, process, and routing defaults.
Wiki workspace rules .cursor/rules/ Repo-specific enforcement for kevin-wiki.
Dedalus references config/dedalus/cursor-rules/ and config/dedalus/agents/rules/ Product/workspace references for the Dedalus monorepo.
Canonical wiki routers Agent Operations Hub, Capability Routing Map, Skill Resolver, Active Stack (What to Actually Use) Long-form truth. Projection rules should not fork these.

Always-On Budget

Always-on rules must stay compact enough to load every Cursor turn. When a rule grows into a protocol, move the detail into a wiki page or skill and leave the rule as a pointer.

Core always-on families: wiki source of truth, brain-first lookup, quality conventions, test-before-bulk, no-one-off work, ripgrep, process hygiene, agent-docs mesh, and signal detection.

Update Rule

  1. Update the canonical wiki page or skill first.
  2. Mirror only the compact projection into .mdc.
  3. Run npm run bootstrap when sync targets change.
  4. Run npx tsx scripts/doctor.ts --only config-sync and npm run routing-doctor when routing/projection behavior changed.

Timeline

  • 2026-07-01 | Rebuilt as the Cursor rule-projection quickref, separating compact .mdc rules from canonical wiki routing. Source: User request, 2026-07-01
  • 2026-05-31 | Agent doc compiled from agent-operations-hub always-on checklist. Source: Agent Operations Hub, 2026-05-31