How to Wire Company-Wide Coding Standards into Cursor Agent Skills
Cursor and similar coding agents default to generic patterns that ignore a team's API wrappers, permission directives, and interaction conventions. This architecture makes those conventions machine-readable and scoped to load only when relevant, so the agent behaves like a colleague who already knows the repo's rules rather than a stranger who needs re-briefing every session.
A two-layer architecture pairs a project constitution (AGENTS.md) with on-demand Agent Skills so Cursor follows team-specific rules for API layers, loading states, and form behavior without bloating every prompt. The constitution locks in tech stack, directory responsibilities, and modification boundaries that apply to every conversation. Skills are loaded only when triggered by natural-language phrases like "self-test" or "pre-test check," keeping context lean.
A concrete frontend-self-test Skill walks through git diff output against a 14-category interaction standard, producing Pass / Risk / Needs Manual Verification judgments with file:line references. The Skill's process is kept short in SKILL.md, while the detailed must-do/prohibited rules live in a separate reference.md — a progressive-disclosure pattern that prevents context explosion.
Company-wide standards are shared via git submodule and synced into .cursor/skills so behavior is reproducible across machines, teammates, and cloud agents. The approach replaces a single bloated rules file with a constitution plus a directory of narrowly scoped, judgeable skills that translate generic standards into project-specific implementations like Element Plus loading directives and unified request wrappers.
The biggest failure mode isn't a bad prompt — it's context dilution. When interaction standards are always loaded, the agent loses precision on the actual code change. Splitting constitution from on-demand skills solves this by keeping the system prompt lean.
Making an agent follow team conventions is fundamentally a scoping problem, not a prompting problem. The article's five-step lock-down (only diffed files, only explicit criteria, don't invent patterns, don't modify unprompted, fixed output template) is more valuable than the checklist itself.
The submodule-to-.cursor/skills sync pipeline reveals a gap in current agent tooling: discovery paths aren't portable across machines. Until agents natively read from version-controlled paths, a sync script is the practical bridge to team-wide reproducibility.
Writing judgment criteria as test-case-like predicates ("list has been re-requested" rather than "experience feels smooth") is what makes an agent's output stable enough for a QA handoff. Vague standards produce vague reports that nobody trusts.