instructa/ai-prompts: a prompt library you copy into .cursor/rules, .windsurfrules and .github
Curated AI Prompts for Cursor Rules, Cline, Windsurf and Github Copilot
At a glance
- What is it?
- This repository is a collection of AI coding prompts and rule files plus a small metadata convention for contributing them. It is useful if you already know which tool you use and just want text to drop into that tool's config path. It is not a runtime, a package, or a sync mechanism.
- Who is it for?
- Adopt it if you want pre-written rule text for a tool whose config path you already understand, and you are willing to review that text line by line before it governs an agent's edits. Do not adopt it if you expect a single file to serve Cursor, Windsurf, Copilot, Zed and Cline at once, because the README maps each tool to a different path and format.
- Can I use it commercially?
- Yes. MIT is a permissive licence: you can use, modify and sell software built on it, as long as you keep its copyright and licence notices.
- Is it still maintained?
- Yes. The repository last received commits 126 days ago.
- What is it written in?
- Mainly JavaScript, according to GitHub's language statistics.
Answers come from the project's GitHub data, last synced on September 15, 2026, and from our analysis. They are not legal advice.
DEEP OPEN-SOURCE ANALYSIS
The problem is prompt placement, not prompt writing
Most developers can write a paragraph telling an assistant to prefer named exports or to avoid touching migration files. The friction is knowing where that paragraph has to live for a given editor to read it. Cursor wants files under .cursor/rules/, GitHub Copilot reads .github/copilot-instructions.md at the repository root, Windsurf reads a .windsurfrules file in the project root, Zed uses a .zed/ directory with settings.json, and Cline takes instructions through an extension settings field rather than a file. That table is the most concrete thing in the README, and it is the actual product: a mapping from tool to path.
The audience follows from that. You are a developer who has picked one assistant and wants its behaviour constrained by project conventions without writing the constraint text from scratch. The repository is explicitly framed as a collection of prompts, best practices and curated rules, with the stated goal of helping you set up and refine a workflow using ready-to-use prompts. There is no compiler, no CLI, no install step in the README. You copy text into a path.
What is actually in the repository: prompt folders and aiprompt.json
The contribution instructions describe the layout better than the usage section does. A prompt lives in a folder under prompts/<your-prompt-name>. That folder carries metadata in an aiprompt.json file, and the README points to prompt-template/aiprompt.json as the example to copy. Rule files use the .mdc extension and carry YAML front-matter. The README does not reproduce the schema of aiprompt.json, so the only way to learn which keys are expected is to open the template or an existing prompt folder.
That is a real gap for anyone trying to publish a prompt. You can infer the shape from the template, but the README itself does not state required versus optional fields, nor whether the metadata is consumed by any tooling in the repository or is purely descriptive for the website at instructa.ai. The workflow is a pull request: create the folder, add the metadata, add the .mdc files, submit. CONTRIBUTING.md is referenced for full details, and it is not included in the material available here.
The JavaScript listing for the repository is best explained by the site and any build or validation scripts around the prompt folders rather than by the prompts themselves, which are Markdown and .mdc. That is an inference from the file types named in the README, not something the README states.
Getting a prompt into Cursor, Copilot, Windsurf, Zed or Cline
There is nothing to install. The README's usage section is a set of destinations, and each one is a file or a settings field you create yourself.
For Cursor, place the rule file in the .cursor/rules/ directory. The README's example filename is .cursor/rules/cursorrules.mdc, and it says Cursor detects and applies rules from that directory automatically. The .mdc extension matters here: it is the format that carries YAML front-matter, which is how Cursor decides when a rule applies. If you rename the file to .md, you have changed the format.
For GitHub Copilot, create .github/copilot-instructions.md at the repository root and write natural language instructions in Markdown. The README describes this as guiding Copilot's behaviour across the project, which means the instructions travel with the repository and apply to anyone working in it.
For Windsurf, add a .windsurfrules file to the project root. For Zed, use a .zed/ directory and a .zed/settings.json file for project-specific settings. For Cline, the README gives three steps: open the Cline extension settings, find the Custom Instructions field, and paste the instructions there. Note that the Cline path is not a file in your repository, so those instructions do not travel with the code and are not shared with collaborators who clone it.
One practical consequence of this model: the same prompt text usually has to exist in several places if your team uses more than one editor, and nothing in the repository keeps those copies in sync. The README does not describe any generation step that would emit .cursor/rules/ and .github/copilot-instructions.md from one source.
The copy-paste model has no update path
Prompt files are instructions that an agent reads before it edits your code, which makes them closer to configuration than to documentation. The repository has no versioning story for the copies you take. Once you paste a rule into .cursor/rules/, you own it. When the upstream prompt changes, or when Cursor changes how it interprets front-matter, you find out by noticing that the assistant's behaviour drifted, not by a failing build.
There is a second failure mode specific to this category. Rules are natural language, so a prompt that works well for one model version can produce different behaviour on the next. The README does not state which model versions any prompt was written against, and the repository has no releases retrieved, so there is no changelog to consult for what changed between prompt revisions. You are reading the current state of a folder and guessing how it evolved.
A third constraint is scope. A rule file that says "always write tests first" is applied to every request in that project. Prompts written for a general audience tend to be either broad enough to be harmless (and therefore low value) or specific enough to conflict with your codebase (and therefore actively harmful). The material here does not include guidance on narrowing a prompt's trigger conditions beyond the front-matter mechanism itself.
Why not just write your own rules file
The honest alternative is a single hand-written file in your own repository, tailored to your stack. The difference in approach is not quality, it is specificity. A curated prompt has to work for strangers, so it cannot know that your project uses a particular ORM, that your CI rejects files over a certain size, or that your team has settled a naming argument a year ago. A file you write can say all of that in ten lines.
What the repository offers instead is a starting point and a convention. If you have never written a rule file, reading a few .mdc examples shows you what front-matter looks like and how much text is reasonable before the assistant starts ignoring it. That is a real benefit and it is a one-time benefit. After the first file, the marginal value of someone else's prompt drops sharply unless the prompt covers a domain you have not thought about.
A second alternative worth naming is the tool's own documentation. The README links to Cursor's project rules guide, GitHub's custom instructions page, Zed's configuration docs and the Windsurf getting started guide. Those pages define the format and the precedence rules. This repository supplies content for that format. If the two disagree, the tool's documentation wins, because it describes the parser that actually runs.
Maintenance cost and the MIT licence
The repository is licensed MIT, and the README restates that you are free to use, modify and distribute it under those terms. For prompt text this is about as permissive as it gets, and it means copying a rule into a private repository or a commercial product does not create an obligation to publish anything. The LICENSE file in the repository root is the authoritative text; the README summary is not a substitute for it, and this is not legal advice.
Maintenance is where the cost sits. Nothing in the material describes a release process, a changelog, or a version tag for individual prompts, and no releases were retrieved. The last push to the default branch is dated 2026-05-13, which tells you the project is active but not how any single prompt has changed. If you vendor a prompt, budget for re-reading it periodically against the tool's current documentation, because the format has moved before: the README's own link to the Cursor rules blog post references version 0.45, which is a reminder that the rules mechanism itself has been revised.
Contributing carries its own cost. You need to match the folder layout under prompts/, produce a valid aiprompt.json, and attach YAML front-matter to .mdc files. The README does not state whether a CI check validates that metadata, though the build status badge and the reference to a ci.yml workflow suggest some automated check exists. Confirm what it enforces before opening a pull request.
Editorial conclusion
Adopt it if you want pre-written rule text for a tool whose config path you already understand, and you are willing to review that text line by line before it governs an agent's edits. Do not adopt it if you expect a single file to serve Cursor, Windsurf, Copilot, Zed and Cline at once, because the README maps each tool to a different path and format. Verify three things first: that the prompt you pick still matches the tool version you run, that the .mdc front-matter parses in your Cursor setup, and that the MIT licence terms in the repository LICENSE file suit how you redistribute the text.
Community notes