Writing Cursor rules with a Cursor rule

Summary

I spend most of my coding time in Cursor. It's a fantastic tool for LLM assisted coding. But coding with LLMs has a specific quirk: they possess strong contextual memory but lack episodic memory. In simpler words, they recall information within a single conversation but forget everything once a new chat session begins. No learnings from previous chats on how you like things. No accumulation of instituation quirks and knowledge. Think of it like working with a brilliant assistant who has amnesia. Every day, you repeat the same instructions: "Remember, we use camelCase here." "Our shared utilities go in the lib folder with this specific structure." "This is how the backend API expects requests." "We use this specific folder structure for our projects." If you use Cursor often, this should sound familiar. You constantly nudge the AI back toward your project's standards and personal preferences. If you're already nodding in agreement and (from the title) understand where I'm going with this, you probably just want the meta cursor rule template that I use. In that case, you can jump straight to The Plug-and-Play Meta-Cursor Rule. If you're still unsure what I'm talking about, I'll explain in more detail why this is necessary, how we solve the problem with cursor rules, and how to create cursor rules efficiently using a meta-rule approach. Why, How, Then What My approach when writing posts in this blog is to help others understand why we need to do something and how we might go about creating a solution. The what (the specific implementation or solution) becomes much more obvious after understanding the why and how. Especially the why! I personally think you will come up with a better solution (what) than the one I provide that is specific to your project and personal preferences. So let's start with the why. Why You Need Systems for AI Imagine you're managing several projects, each with a brilliant developer assigned. Here's the catch: every morning, all your developers ...