Cursor Rules Template

June 14, 2025

AI coding IDEs like Cursor are powerful, but they can sometimes lose context during long or complex projects. How many times have you had to re-explain your project's architecture or goals? What if you could give your AI a persistent memory and a set of structured workflows to follow?

That's exactly what the cursor-rules-template is for. It's a GitHub template that provides a robust framework for your AI assistant, enabling it to maintain long-term context, understand your project's architecture, and follow consistent development protocols.

What is cursor-rules-template?

This project is a boilerplate for starting new projects with an AI assistant. It establishes a directory structure and a set of "rules" that guide the AI's behavior. By separating project documentation, tasks, and source code into a predictable structure, the AI can read and update its own "memory," ensuring it always has the context it needs.

The core idea is to treat your project's documentation not as a static artifact, but as a dynamic, live memory for your AI partner.

The Core Idea: Giving Your AI a Memory

The "brain" of the template is defined in .cursor/rules/memory.mdc and lives within the docs/ and tasks/ directories. The AI is instructed to treat these files as its primary source of truth.

• docs/product_requirement_docs.md: This is the "Why." It defines the project's purpose, features, and users. It's the source of truth for the project's goals.
• docs/architecture_docs.md: This is the "How." It outlines the system's design, technology stack, data flow, and technical constraints. It even includes Mermaid diagrams to visualize the architecture, which the AI can read and understand.
• tasks/tasks_plan.md: This is the project backlog. It tracks what's done, what needs to be done, and any known issues.
• tasks/active_context.md: This is the AI's short-term memory. It captures the immediate development focus, recent decisions, and the very next steps.

By consulting these files, the AI can onboard itself to the project at any time, ensuring its suggestions and code align with your established plans and architecture.

Structured Workflows for Consistency

The template doesn't just provide a memory; it provides a brain. The .cursor/rules/ directory contains rules that define distinct workflows for different development activities.

• Planning (plan.mdc): Before writing any code, the AI follows a strict planning workflow. It must understand requirements, break down the problem, consider multiple solutions, and present a detailed plan for validation.
• Implementation (implement.mdc): When it's time to code, the AI adheres to a systematic protocol. This includes dependency analysis, incremental rollouts, and ensuring all new code fits within the existing architecture.
• Debugging (debug.mdc): For tricky bugs, the AI has a process for diagnosing the root cause by gathering context, reasoning about potential issues, and verifying the fix.
• Learning (lessons-learned.mdc): The AI documents project-specific patterns, user preferences, and key insights, creating a learning journal that makes it smarter and more effective over time.

Project Structure Overview

The template sets up a clean and scalable directory structure:

• .cursor/rules/: The heart of the template, containing all the rules and workflows for the AI.
• docs/: High-level project documentation that serves as the AI's long-term memory.
• tasks/: Task planning, the project backlog, and the AI's working memory.
• src/: Your main application source code.
• test/: Your testing suite.
• utils/, config/, data/: Other standard project directories.

How to Use This Template

Getting started is simple:

1. Use the Template on GitHub: Navigate to the cursor-rules-template repository and click the "Use this template" button to create a new repository for your project.
2. Clone Your New Repository: Clone the new repository to your local machine.
3. Flesh out the "Memory": Before you write a single line of code, start by filling out the documentation:
   • Open docs/product_requirement_docs.md and define what you want to build.
   • Open docs/architecture_docs.md and outline your technical vision: the tech stack, the high-level components, etc.
4. Start Coding with Cursor: Open the project in Cursor. The rules are already in place. Start by giving the AI a high-level task, like "Based on the PRD and architecture docs, set up the initial project structure in the src directory."

The AI will read the documentation you've provided and begin working with full context, following the structured workflows defined in the rules.

Conclusion

The cursor-rules-template transforms your relationship with your AI coding assistant from a series of one-off requests into a true partnership. By providing a persistent memory and clear workflows, you can align the AI with your project's goals, improve the quality and consistency of its output, and ultimately build better software, faster.

Give it a try for your next project and experience a more powerful, context-aware AI development workflow!