Generic spec for AI ruleset

[danitt]

As much as we all love Cursor, it might be a mistake to bind what is essentially a generic AI prompting spec to a specific tool (Cursor IDE). Calling it ".cursorrules" really narrows the audience and applicability to other AI tools / IDEs.

Are there any generic standards for AI/prompt rulesets out there? I'd love to see a standard like .prompt.rules which is entirely tooling-agnostic and specifies a set of generic guidelines for phrasing, formatting, etc.

[patrickalvestc]

I totally agree.

[danitt]

the VSC team have come out with a new standard for defining prompt rules (aka "code instructions"): https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/copilot/copilot-customization#_use-instruction-files

there's a fair bit in the docs, but in it they propose the default generic file name of .instructions.md which looks like a strong candidate imo

@patrickalvestc thoughts?