Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Writing Cursor rules with a Cursor rule

adithyan.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 51 posts

Re: Writing Cursor rules with a Cursor rule

#21

Post by vemv »

Cursor in particular but also others are extremely flaky when it comes to applying rules.

So the next generation of "rules" for Cursor, Claude Code, etc should have some predictability baked in, i.e. not be entirely driven by AI.

Having rules driven by a vanilla, non-AI program ensures that they're actually, consistently applied, with some logs showing if/how they were applied.

Of course, one can augment vanilla rules with some AI capabilities, but the main orchestration should resemble determinism.

I suspect that the main reason why this isn't a reality yet is because costs could easily skyrocket. Personally I'd be willing to pay the extra buck if that means that my comprehensive rule system is actually doing something.

Re: Writing Cursor rules with a Cursor rule

#22

Post by apwell23 »

vemv wrote: post #21

Cursor in particular but also others are extremely flaky when it comes to applying rules. So the next generation of "rules" for Cursor, Claude Code, etc should have some predictability baked in, i.e. not be entirely driven by AI. Having rules driven by a vanilla, non-AI program ensures that they're actually, consistently applied, with some logs showing if/how they were applied. Of course, one can augment vanilla rule…

> non-AI program ensures that they're actually, consistently applied

that would be ironic give ppl using these tools are using it write code that have consistent outputs.

Re: Writing Cursor rules with a Cursor rule

#23

Post by mock-possum »

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…

Honestly I’m having more fun with it than I expected - I kind of enjoy mentoring though, I like sort of feeding a newbie ideas and questions that leads them to make their own breakthrough, and I feel like Cursor delivers that same feeling sometimes.

Other times, I’m just jumping into a quick feature of bugfix ticket that’s nothing particularly fun or interesting - so it’s more fun to basically roleplay overseeing a junior dev, without any of the social pressure of interacting with a real person, and not have to get my hands dirty with boring tasks.

It’s all about finding the opportunity to have fun with it.

I feel like a lot of time is being wasted debating how serious and how real it is - but are you having any fun with it?? Cause I kinda am.

Re: Writing Cursor rules with a Cursor rule

#24

Post by Sonnigeszeug »

amiantos wrote: post #19

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 pointl…

They way they are doing it is wrong, nonetheless the general idea is something i do anyway.

Documenting code style, how to work etc. makes a lot of sense for everyone and i normally have good documentation.

The problem? I know what i do, i don't write the docs for myself but for others or for my future me who might forgotten things. The good thing? Writing it for me, others and LLMs makes it a lot more helpful day to day.

Instead of explaining myself multiply times to AI OR a Junior / new Team Member, i write it down once.

Re: Writing Cursor rules with a Cursor rule

#25

Post by reissbaker »

amiantos wrote: post #19

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 pointl…

FWIW "vibe coding" is a term invented by Andrej Karpathy in a tweet in February of this year, describing his own personal coding workflow. I don't think Cursor has tried to promise automating every aspect of software development hands-free.

My experience mirrors yours in the sense that most coding agents are very fast, but quite junior, engineers who sometimes struggle to fix their own bugs. Nonetheless there is an advantage to speed, and if you're working on a problem a junior engineer could solve, at this point why bother doing it yourself? One of the coding agents (I prefer Claude Code personally since it's a terminal-based tool, but Cursor is similar) can write out the code faster than I can. If it adds a bug, I can usually fix it quite quickly anyway; after all, I'm not using it for the more complex problems.

Where they are today though, I wouldn't use them for hard problems, e.g. dealing with race conditions in complex codebases. For simpler webdev tasks though they're pretty useful: it's been a long time since I've hand-written an admin dashboard, for example.

Re: Writing Cursor rules with a Cursor rule

#26

Post by jen729w »

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…

Pretty average dev here. It's not my profession but I do use it to make some of my living, whatever sense that makes.

Cursor is magic. Two massive use-cases for me:

1. Autocompletion of a copied function.

So I have some function, modX(paramX), and I need to duplicate it to modY(paramY). They're near enough the same. I love that I can copy/paste it, rename a variable or two, and Cursor then intuits what I need. Tab tab tabbity-tab later, job done. This might not be the most amazing use of AI but is sure as shit helps my RSI.

(I know I should abstract my functions yada yada.)

2. Generation of a new function where I have no idea how to start.

I tell the prompt what I need. "I'll give you a bunch of Markdown files and I'd like you to take the frontmatter properties and put them on an object then take each of the headers and its following content and put that in to this property on the object".

It'll do that, to 90%. I'll fix the 10%, making sure that I understand what it's created for me.

This would have taken me 4 hours. With Cursor it takes 15 minutes.

Re: Writing Cursor rules with a Cursor rule

#27

Post by namaria »

kristoff200512 wrote: post #12
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.

When using low traction languages and claiming LLMs are a boon, I often wonder if one doesn't end up with an even lower traction language by trying to figure out how to phrase things in English.

In my experience, the solution to low traction languages and frameworks with lots of boilerplate and busy work coding is to use higher traction languages. I much prefer to grapple the problem with my brain in a tighter way than to attempt shaping a loose language with a looser one...

Re: Writing Cursor rules with a Cursor rule

#28

Post by rockbruno »

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 find Cursor (or any LLM in general) to be amazing at doing very simple and concrete tasks for me. It really saves me a lot of time.

But the keyword here is "simple and concrete". I do not understand why people expect those tools to be good at tasks that involve having years of context on something. It really makes you think that the people that say that AI will replace SWEs have never actually used any of these tools.

Re: Writing Cursor rules with a Cursor rule

#29

Post by icelancer »

verelo wrote: post #14
icelancer wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've really only had two problems:

- Gemini: refuses to work 20-30% of the time - Sonnnet: does 50% too much work

Post reply on HN