Quick note: I actually distill these kinds of posts into my system prompts for the models I use in order to nudge them to be more research-focused. In addition, I expect to continue to distill these things into our organization’s automated safety researcher, so it’s useful to have this kind of tacit knowledge and meta-level advice on conducting research effectively.
So far, I have not systematized this enough to really have an idea of how helpful it is, but it is something I want to do soon.
But here’s my Cursor User Rules. You can ctrl+f to <research principles> for the specifics I added on research principles, which were curated mainly from this post. I think there could be a lot of improvements here (and actual testing that needs to be done), but figured I’d still share.
I will say that I arrived at this set of user rules by iterating on getting Sonnet 3.7 (when it first came out) to one-shot a variation on the emergent misalignment experiments. The goal was to get it to fine-tune on a subset of the dataset (removing the chmod777 examples) in the fewest number of steps / tool calls and with no assistance from me besides a short instruction linking to the URL of the codebase and telling it to run the variation I asked. The difference between my old, simpler user rules and the new ones was that not only the Cursor Agent with 3.7 (and 3.5) could actually accomplish the task, it was able to do so significantly more efficiently.
That said, Cursor has made adjustments to their agent’s system prompt over time so unclear how much more helpful it is now.
And lastly, this still doesn’t cover the ability to do a brand new research project, but I hope to work on that too.
Thanks Neel!
Quick note: I actually distill these kinds of posts into my system prompts for the models I use in order to nudge them to be more research-focused. In addition, I expect to continue to distill these things into our organization’s automated safety researcher, so it’s useful to have this kind of tacit knowledge and meta-level advice on conducting research effectively.
Interesting, I would love to hear about whether it works, and to see the prompt
So far, I have not systematized this enough to really have an idea of how helpful it is, but it is something I want to do soon.
But here’s my Cursor User Rules. You can ctrl+f to <research principles> for the specifics I added on research principles, which were curated mainly from this post. I think there could be a lot of improvements here (and actual testing that needs to be done), but figured I’d still share.
I will say that I arrived at this set of user rules by iterating on getting Sonnet 3.7 (when it first came out) to one-shot a variation on the emergent misalignment experiments. The goal was to get it to fine-tune on a subset of the dataset (removing the chmod777 examples) in the fewest number of steps / tool calls and with no assistance from me besides a short instruction linking to the URL of the codebase and telling it to run the variation I asked. The difference between my old, simpler user rules and the new ones was that not only the Cursor Agent with 3.7 (and 3.5) could actually accomplish the task, it was able to do so significantly more efficiently.
That said, Cursor has made adjustments to their agent’s system prompt over time so unclear how much more helpful it is now.
And lastly, this still doesn’t cover the ability to do a brand new research project, but I hope to work on that too.