Cursor lets cloud agents subscribe to events and hold goals
Cursor's August 19 changelog adds event-driven subscriptions, per-VM subagents, and long-lived objectives to its cloud agents, pushing its coding assistant toward unattended operation rather than turn-by-turn prompting.
Cursor has updated its cloud agents and underlying harness so that agents "can operate as a system, building and shipping software on their own without the need for intervention at each loop," according to the company's changelog dated August 19.
The central addition is subscriptions: a Cursor agent can attach to an event source — a pull request, a Slack thread, or a scheduled task — and wake when something happens there. Cloud agents automatically subscribe to PRs they open and drive them to completion, fixing CI failures and responding to bot comments. In Slack, users can tell @cursor to check back in an hour and keep working until feedback arrives. Subscriptions are limited to cloud agents for now.
Subagents can now run on their own virtual machines, each with an isolated copy of the project and clean context, so they can test a parent agent's changes in a fresh environment or "swarm" independent fixes without collisions.
Two smaller additions target persistence and control. /goal assigns an agent a long-lived objective — the example given is fixing all flaky tests until CI is green — and can be paired with /loop for recurring check-ins. Any skill can be pinned as a Custom Mode via ⌥⏎ on Mac or Alt+Enter on Windows, keeping an "always on" skill in the chat. Follow-up messages now queue until the agent's next tool call rather than interrupting it mid-action.
Cursor did not publish benchmarks, pricing, or usage limits for the new capabilities.