🚀 Recently, I started building my own Cursor rule set for creating .NET Core Background Worker projects.
The goal is simple:
Teach AI to generate not just “working code”, but production-ready architecture from the start.
Now, every new Worker Service automatically includes:
✅ Clean Architecture
✅ BackgroundService pattern
✅ Serilog logging
✅ Docker support
✅ HealthChecks
✅ IOptions pattern
✅ Graceful shutdown
✅ Retry policies with Polly
One rule that made a huge difference 👇
Do not consider the project complete unless Dockerfile and .dockerignore are created.
This small convention changes the output from:
❌ “AI-generated demo project”
to
✅ deployable backend infrastructure.
I think the real power of AI coding is not prompt engineering —
it’s teaching engineering conventions to AI.
Cursor Rules and ChatGPT Skills are becoming incredibly powerful for standardizing software development workflows.
Here is the rule.
`---
description: "Use this rule when creating or modifying .NET 8 Background Worker / Worker Service projects."
globs:
- "*/.cs"
- "*/.csproj" alwaysApply: false ---
.NET 8 Background Worker Standards
You are generating a production-ready .NET 8 Worker Service project.
Architecture
Use:
- Clean Architecture
- SOLID principles
- Dependency Injection
- Options Pattern
- Async/Await best practices
Project structure:
src/
Worker/
Application/
Domain/
Infrastructure/
tests/
Worker.Tests/
Worker Rules
- Use BackgroundService
- Keep business logic outside Worker.cs
- Use interfaces for external services
- Support CancellationToken everywhere
- Add structured logging
- Handle graceful shutdown correctly
- Add retry policies with Polly for external calls
- Use IConfiguration + IOptions
Logging
Use:
- Serilog
- Console logging
- Enrichers when necessary
Add logs for:
- Startup
- Shutdown
- Errors
- Retry attempts
- Successful operations
Docker
Every generated project MUST include:
- Dockerfile
- .dockerignore
- Multi-stage Docker build
- .NET 8 official images
- Production-ready container setup
Example requirements:
- Use sdk image for build
- Use runtime image for final stage
- Minimize image size
- Copy only required files
Do not consider the project complete unless Dockerfile and .dockerignore are created.
Configuration
Include:
- appsettings.json
- appsettings.Development.json
- Environment variable support
README
Generate a README containing:
- Project overview
- Run instructions
- Docker build/run commands
- Environment variables
- Architecture overview
Code Quality
Prefer:
- Production-ready examples
- Minimal but scalable structure
- Readable naming
- Small focused classes
Avoid:
- Overengineering
- Business logic in infrastructure
- Static helper abuse
- Blocking calls`
Thank you.