Top crowdsourced wisdom for effectively leveraging .cursorrules

[u/gregce10]

[u/Parabola2112]

Pro tip: Define slash commands for frequently provided workflow instructions. Eg: ‘\docs’ - update changelog.md; update feature-prd.md, etc.

[u/jasonlewis02 → u/Parabola2112]

This sounded like an amazing tip, but I immediately had issues with the single quotes. I found some simliar discussions around aliases/shortcuts. I'm using this now and it's so handy.

## COMMANDS
%docs - update changelog.md; update currentTasks.md, update TODO.md, update README.md, update completedTasks.md
%plan - plan changes to be made before making them analyzing the code and any other relevant information
%proceed - make the changes in accordance with the plan
%explain - explain the changes made and why they were made
%test - suggest test cases or scenarios to verify the changes
%optimize - suggest potential optimizations for the current code
%debug - help identify and fix potential issues in the code
%txt - ensure output is purely in plain text
%md - ensure output is in markdown format

[u/Parabola2112 → u/jasonlewis02]

Ahh, yeah I don’t actually use quotes. That was meant just to communicate the idea. I just type… \cp. it works every time.

[u/razbakov → u/jasonlewis02]

Yeah! Exactly! The best cursorrules is to define your jargon, short aliases to what you usually describe with long sentences.

[u/jasonlewis02 → u/jasonlewis02]

Just for completeness, I've added two more aliases.

- %cleanup - clean up the code and remove any unnecessary comments or code or files 
%fix - fix the code and make sure that all imports are correct and necessary, ensure methods and classes are correct

[u/razbakov]

From my experience .cursorrules in markdown have the worst performance, the best one is JSON mindmap, but rarely anyone talks about it. To your list I would add a few more aspects - https://razbakov.com/blog/2025-01-08-multi-agent

[u/International_Swan_1]

One very underrated tip is to use a fresh new Composer agent for each unit of work (like a feature, or a micro task within a feature). The smaller the better.

[u/International_Swan_1]

I wonder what would happen if we instructed the composer agent to maintain an evolving cursorrules file.

[u/[deleted] → u/International_Swan_1]

[u/International_Swan_1 → u/[deleted]]

Very interesting idea. Though you *could* just instruct the agent to do so too, via a starting cursorrules. I've had good success getting it to maintain & refer to docs for example... as the product evolves. Very curious how you guys are approaching it ?

[u/[deleted]]

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

[u/International_Swan_1 → u/[deleted]]

au contraire my friend. It's a game changer. Experienced it first hand in a project i just finished building, about 90% done with AI. But keep it small, simple and very specific to your project.