An Empirical Study of Developer-Provided Context for AI Coding Assistants in Open-Source Projects

Abstract: While LLMs have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, research shows that their effectiveness depends not only on explicit prompts but also on the broader context provided. This requirement is especially pronounced in software engineering, where the goals, architecture, and collaborative conventions of an existing project play critical roles in response quality. To support this, many AI coding assistants have introduced ways for developers to author persistent, machine-readable directives that encode a project's unique constraints. Although this practice is growing, the content of these directives remains unstudied. This paper presents a large-scale empirical study to characterize this emerging form of developer-provided context. Through a qualitative analysis of 401 open-source repositories containing cursor rules, we developed a comprehensive taxonomy of project context that developers consider essential, organized into five high-level themes: Conventions, Guidelines, Project Information, LLM Directives, and Examples. Our study also explores how this context varies across different project types and programming languages, offering implications for the next generation of context-aware AI developer tools.