There are four levers, from narrowest to widest: ignore specific words, disable a whole cue source, scope the disable to one project, or delete the source outright. All of them hot-reload within a couple of seconds; nothing needs a restart.
Ignore words, or disable sources
Both live in the CUES.md master file's frontmatter:
ignore: [TODO, FIXME]: the listed words are never cued by anything. Right for jargon, project names, and identifiers that a spell-check or domain cue keeps flagging.disable: [legal, medical]: the named cue sources are skipped entirely at this layer. The folders undercues/stay untouched, so re-enabling is deleting the entry, not re-installing anything.
Scope it to a project
disable: subtracts at the layer it appears in. Put it in <project>/.cues/CUES.md and the cue is muted only when you're working inside that project, while staying active everywhere else. Team-wise this composes: a repo can ship a project-level CUES.md that mutes a shipped cue for everyone who clones it. The same pattern works for the other surface: BLANKS.md takes disable: [stocks] for blanks.
The blunt instruments
To silence the whole surface rather than one source, flip the scalar in ~/.cues/OPENCUES.md: word-cues-mode: off kills LLM word cues, tips-mode: off kills static tip groups. And since every cue is just a folder, deleting ~/.cues/cues/<name>/ works for your own cues - but for a shipped one it doesn't stick, because opencues seed-configs (which runs on install and update) re-seeds any shipped file that's missing. For a mute that survives re-seeding, use disable:. If the goal is quiet rather than gone, remember cues are ignorable by design: an unengaged cue never interrupts, it just sits dimmed.
Related: What is CUES.md? · Project-level cues · Scoping per site and host · GitHub repo