Single-folder vs Rule-per-folder

[TomLucidor]

This is a bit of a nitpick, but something worth considering. There are two ways of writing code files

1. Have .cursor/rules (or whichever IDE) capture a microcosm of what the file structure should look like, and then glob accordingly. This way we can have one single "power folder" that can be easily inserted into ANY new projects.
2. Have rule file for every folder, making things easier to browse but harder to transplant to other codebases.

1 is better than 2 in the long term, and it will be useful if it absorbs best practices. Maybe even we can have one "mother" folders for many sub-projects! Still, 2 can allow for minor tweaks in case 1 fails.

Reference to https://github.com/intellectronica/ruler?tab=readme-ov-file#nested-rule-loading

[intellectronica]

I'm not sure I understand the value of this, other than replicating the structure used by Cursor (and Copilot)? If there's a vendor-specific mechanism that you love using, why not just use that?

My tendency now is to follow the AGENTS.md standard (and any additional widely adopted standards that emerge). Regardless of opinion (I actually like it better, but I can see how others might prefer the apply rules solution), if that's the emergent standard, it should be prioritised.

[zbeyens]

I understand this project is AGENTS.md-centric, so I'm maintaining a fork that has first-class support for claude skills and cursor rules. I've added merge_strategy = "cursor" option that handles .mdc frontmatter, copies .ruler/rules/ to .cursor/rules/, and auto-converts rules to skills: udecode#1

[TomLucidor]

@zbeyens could you also see what is going on with this new attempt at the problem? https://github.com/leochiu-a/universal-agents

[zbeyens]

This is built around .agents/skills and .agents/rules, while skiller (the fork) does everything using Cursor rules convention in .claude/rules:

• If alwaysApply is true, the rule is merged into the global AGENTS.md
• Otherwise, the rule is converted into a skill (or cursor rule)

[intellectronica]

Are skills in Cursor the same thing as Claude skills? Ruler has some basic support, which I'd like to extend, and I really think skills are the way forward. Is the idea here that skills can be selected based on a file pattern?

[zbeyens]

Yes, Cursor rules have 4 behaviors:

• Always Apply: merged into AGENTS.md
• Apply Intelligently: from description. Claude: skills. Others: skillz MCP.
• Apply to Specific Files: from globs. I'm not aware of any other agent supporting this, so a workaround is to append "Always use this skill for globs files" to the description, which is probably less powerful for the other agents.

So I prefer to exclude Cursor from skillz MCP generation.

[TomLucidor]

Side note: Skills/subagents probably have their own sharable formats now https://github.com/vercel-labs/add-skill