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Writing Cursor rules with a Cursor rule

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Re: Writing Cursor rules with a Cursor rule

#11

Post by athoun »

sebmellen wrote: post #10
athoun wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know if I’m doing something wrong, but Gemini 2.5 pro was substantially worse coding quality than Grok. Which is surprising since I’m working on a Golang codebase which I had assumed Gemini would excel at given that it’s made by Google

Grok is quickly becoming my favorite model just because it’s so verbose, but at the same time low on BS.

Yes, Grok has become my go to model for general research and targeted coding tasks. Feels like its getting better over time vs ChatGPT which seemed to deteriorate over time.

Claude 3.7 is excellent, and better at coding but I appreciate the context size of Grok and feel like I get better bang for my buck for general purpose research too.

Re: Writing Cursor rules with a Cursor rule

#12

Post by kristoff200512 »

christophilus wrote: post #6

I have found Cursor to be frustrating and exhausting to work with, even with my rules file. When it works, it’s like magic. But most of the time, it feels like working with a Jr. dev who has a bit of a concussion. Code review is wearying work, and using Cursor means you’re doing a lot of code review. I have never once gotten into a flow state with it. That was a long preamble to this question: any senior devs out the…

Yes, I previously used Cursor to build my SaaS, but now I need to refactor because the codebase has become unmodifiable. With AI coding tools, you must describe your problem extremely precisely—otherwise, things quickly turn into a mess.

Re: Writing Cursor rules with a Cursor rule

#13

Post by icelancer »

christophilus wrote: post #6

I have found Cursor to be frustrating and exhausting to work with, even with my rules file. When it works, it’s like magic. But most of the time, it feels like working with a Jr. dev who has a bit of a concussion. Code review is wearying work, and using Cursor means you’re doing a lot of code review. I have never once gotten into a flow state with it. That was a long preamble to this question: any senior devs out the…

I've been coding for 20+ years but I'm not sure that I'm a senior dev necessarily. That said, I use Cursor all the time and have had a lot of success.

Mostly you have to guide it a lot in verbose, planning methodology, often chained via other LLMs. It is like working with a junior developer - no doubt about that. But that's still really good for $20/month.

Coding is not my full time job and it really hasn't been more than 20 hrs/week since my time in FAANG; I do a lot of statistical work, IT, and other stuff too. Maybe that's why I like the mercurial help of Cursor since I am not using it 50 hours/week.

Re: Writing Cursor rules with a Cursor rule

#14

Post by verelo »

icelancer wrote: post #13
christophilus wrote: post #6

I have found Cursor to be frustrating and exhausting to work with, even with my rules file. When it works, it’s like magic. But most of the time, it feels like working with a Jr. dev who has a bit of a concussion. Code review is wearying work, and using Cursor means you’re doing a lot of code review. I have never once gotten into a flow state with it. That was a long preamble to this question: any senior devs out the…

I've been coding for 20+ years but I'm not sure that I'm a senior dev necessarily. That said, I use Cursor all the time and have had a lot of success. Mostly you have to guide it a lot in verbose, planning methodology, often chained via other LLMs. It is like working with a junior developer - no doubt about that. But that's still really good for $20/month. Coding is not my full time job and it really hasn't been more…

This was my experience, until the latest update. Suddenly cursor is useless. The agent option? Terrible. What’s manual, what’s ask? Just give me what i had before…such a step backwards.

Re: Writing Cursor rules with a Cursor rule

#15

Post by insane_dreamer »

sebmellen wrote: post #10
athoun wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know if I’m doing something wrong, but Gemini 2.5 pro was substantially worse coding quality than Grok. Which is surprising since I’m working on a Golang codebase which I had assumed Gemini would excel at given that it’s made by Google

Grok is quickly becoming my favorite model just because it’s so verbose, but at the same time low on BS.

Yeah. I’m finding Gemini to be very verbose. Getting better results with Claude Sonnet. But Gemini has the larger context window.

Re: Writing Cursor rules with a Cursor rule

#17

Post by richardw »

christophilus wrote: post #6

I have found Cursor to be frustrating and exhausting to work with, even with my rules file. When it works, it’s like magic. But most of the time, it feels like working with a Jr. dev who has a bit of a concussion. Code review is wearying work, and using Cursor means you’re doing a lot of code review. I have never once gotten into a flow state with it. That was a long preamble to this question: any senior devs out the…

Yup 30+ year dev here. Tried Cursor for a bit and honestly most of the tokens burned were fighting with stupid code generation, and having it confidently push on. Just cancelled my sub today. Been working with Windsurf the last few weeks and it feels a little more controllable. However, what I tend to do is work on conceptual design, brainstorming etc with ChatGPT (o1/o3-mini-high) or Claude, then when I converge I bring the task to Windsurf for its slightly better view of the code and ability to execute across many files.

Re: Writing Cursor rules with a Cursor rule

#18

Post by aledalgrande »

Seems like we're rediscovering/reinventing the same thing over and over, this is very close to Memory Bank from Cline https://docs.cline.bot/improving-your-prompting-skills/cline...

I have seen a number of articles and Youtube videos posting more or less the same thing.

Re: Writing Cursor rules with a Cursor rule

#19

Post by amiantos »

This feels like a bandaid on a gaping wound to me. Maybe you're making certain aspects of using Cursor/Copilot Agent Mode less annoying, but they're still there and still annoying.

In the parts of the open source LLM community that are interested in roleplay chat, the veterans seem to have the viewpoint that spending a lot of time tinkering to try to overcome the inherent flaws in this technology is relatively pointless; at a certain point, it's random, and the technology just isn't that great, you're expecting too much. Just wait for the next great model. But don't waste your time putting bandaids all over the huge flaws in the technology, you're still not going to get the results you want consistently.

I can't help but think of that here. I don't want to spend my time managing a junior engineer with amnesia, writing Rules files for it to follow, come on now. We're supposed to pay $20/mo with usage limits for that? The promise of "vibe coding" according to all the breathless media coverage and hype is that it'll supercharge me 100x. No one said anything about "Cursor rules files"!

I'll stick with Copilot's "fancy auto-complete", that does speed me up quite a bit. My forays into Agent mode and Cursor left me feeling pretty annoyed, and, like I said, I don't want a junior developer I'm managing through a chat sidebar, I'll just do the programming myself. Get back to me when Cursor is at senior or principal engineer level.

Re: Writing Cursor rules with a Cursor rule

#20

Post by brylie »

Hopefully, we'll converge on a standard, product-agnostic file naming convention, similar to .editorconfig. Are there any existing/emerging generic conventions, like .llm-instructions, that products like Cursor and GitHub Copilot support? This could be useful for teams and orgs with diverse LLM usage.
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