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CursordebugCLI & tooling

Locate Cursor user rules storage on disk

Session from merchantscroll-traces on Hugging Face by vedalken · MIT · condensed by Coders Talk

16ssession
1interventions
GOAL

Find out where Cursor stores user rules (specifically the 'Package Management with uv' rule) on the developer's machine.

  1. Prompt · +0
    Where are Cursor rules stored on my computer? e.g. the 'Package management with uv' rule
  2. Agent did · +0m
    Searched extensively across ~/.cursor, ~/.config/Cursor, settings.json, storage.json and the state.vscdb SQLite database for the rule text and any rules/skills folders.
  3. Fail · +0m
    Concluded the rule was not a plain file but stored inside Cursor's internal state.vscdb SQLite database, since it found no ~/.cursor/rules folder at the time.
  4. Intervention · +0m
    Asked the agent to specifically check ~/.cursor again for skills or rules folders.
    Why: I didn't buy the SQLite-only answer and wanted it to look again directly at the folder instead of guessing from the database.
  5. Agent did · +0m
    Re-listed ~/.cursor and found rules/ and skills/ directories present, then read force-uv.md to confirm the rule content.
  6. Outcome · +0m
    Confirmed the rule lives at ~/.cursor/rules/rules/force-uv.md among 10 rule files, plus a ~/.cursor/skills/ folder with several skill directories.
VERDICT

Next time I'd just tell it to `ls -la ~/.cursor/rules` and `~/.cursor/skills` directly instead of letting it guess from settings.json and the SQLite state.vscdb. The correction that actually worked was me asking it to go back and literally check ~/.cursor again rather than trust its database theory.

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