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Using Your Existing Claude Code CLAUDE.md with Cursor CLI

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AI
CLI
Cursor
Claude Code
agentsmd
tech

Introduction

When I launched Cursor the other day, I saw an unfamiliar message in the terminal. It was a prompt to install the Cursor CLI. I thought, "Oh, a CLI has been released," and immediately installed it. That was when I started to wonder if I could reuse the CLAUDE.md file and skills I had cultivated with Claude Code.

As it turns out, I only needed two symbolic links.

Installing the Cursor CLI

Installation is a simple one-liner:

$ curl https://cursor.com/install -fsS | bash

Cursor Agent Installer

✓ Detected linux/x64
✓ Package downloaded and extracted
✓ Package installed successfully
✓ Bin directory ready
✓ Symlink created

✨ Installation Complete!


Start using Cursor Agent:
   agent


Happy coding! 🚀

$

This makes the agent command available.

Cursor does not read CLAUDE.md

This is the biggest hurdle. Cursor supports an open standard called AGENTS.md, and it completely ignores CLAUDE.md.

AGENTS.md is a format jointly developed in mid-2025 by organizations like OpenAI, Google, and Cursor. It is just plain Markdown. The contents are essentially the same as what you would write in Claude Code's CLAUDE.md, but because the filenames differ, they do not recognize each other.

Run the following in your project root:

ln -s CLAUDE.md AGENTS.md
mkdir -p .cursor
ln -s ../.claude/skills .cursor/skills

In the first line, we expose CLAUDE.md to Cursor as AGENTS.md. In the second and third lines, we share the skills. Skills follow the Agent Skills Open Standard format, which is compatible between Claude Code and Cursor, so they work just by linking them.

If you are operating solely with ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md (i.e., you have no CLAUDE.md in your project), it would look like this:

ln -s ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md AGENTS.md
mkdir -p .cursor
ln -s ../.claude/skills .cursor/skills

Global rules require manual handling

While Claude Code merges both ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md (global) and ./CLAUDE.md (project), Cursor does not yet have a mechanism for a global AGENTS.md. There is an open feature request, but it is currently unsupported.

Therefore, for global rules, you must manually paste them into Cursor Settings > Rules > User Rules. This is the only part that cannot be automated.

Incidentally, Cursor reads global skills (~/.claude/skills/) directly, so you don't need to do anything there.

Important Considerations

The rules directory format differs slightly — The front matter format varies between .claude/rules/ and .cursor/rules/. However, since Claude Code ignores the front matter and reads only the Markdown body, you can standardize on the Cursor format so that both work.

Moving toward AGENTS.md in the long term seems best

Since AGENTS.md is establishing itself as an open standard, it may eventually be smarter to manage AGENTS.md as the source of truth and write See @AGENTS.md in CLAUDE.md. However, since Claude Code does not natively support AGENTS.md yet, I think managing it via symbolic links will suffice for now.

Conclusion

With the introduction of the Cursor CLI, an environment where you can use both Claude Code and Cursor from the terminal is now ready. To leverage your CLAUDE.md assets in Cursor, you only need to create two symbolic links.

  • Symbolic link from CLAUDE.md to AGENTS.md
  • Symbolic link from .claude/skills to .cursor/skills
  • Manually copy only global rules to Cursor Settings

As AGENTS.md continues to spread as an open standard, adopting this mechanism now will allow you to develop using the same rules regardless of which tool you use in the future.

References

Discussion