Cursor Launches Automated Agentic Coding System
Cursor introduces Automations to streamline agentic coding workflows
San Francisco: Software engineers face a new challenge called agentic coding.
As agentic coding spreads, the working life of software engineers has become dazzlingly complex.
A single engineer might oversee dozens of coding agents at once, launching and guiding different processes as needed. It’s a lot to keep track of, and human engineers’ attention has quickly become the limiting resource.
Cursor launched a new tool Thursday aimed at keeping that chaos in check.
Called Automations, it lets users automatically launch agents within their coding environment, triggered by changes in the codebase, a Slack message, or a simple timer.
This system helps review and maintain all the new code created by agentic tools without tracking dozens of agents at once.
At the most basic level, Automations are a way for engineers to break out of the “prompt-and-monitor” dynamic that defines most agent-based engineering.
Instead of launching agents with a human prompt, Cursor’s Automation framework lets you launch agents automatically — and loop humans in whenever they’re needed.
“It’s not that humans are completely out of the picture,” said Jonas Nelle, Cursor’s engineering chief for asynchronous agents.
One early example is Bugbot, a Cursor feature that reviews new code for bugs and other issues.
Using Automations, Cursor has expanded that system to more involved security audits and more thorough reviews.
“This idea of thinking harder, spending more tokens to find harder issues, has been really valuable,” said engineering lead Josh Ma.
Cursor estimates that it runs hundreds of automations per hour, reaching far beyond simple code review.
The system is also used for incident response, with PagerDuty alerts initiating an agent that can immediately query server logs.
A separate automation offers weekly summaries of changes to the codebase on Cursor’s company Slack.
The new system comes amid intense competition in the agentic coding space, with both OpenAI and Anthropic having made significant updates to their tools in the past month.
Ramp data shows Cursor’s market share holding steady since May, with roughly 25% of generative AI clients subscribing to Cursor in some capacity.
Still, the overall growth of the agentic coding space has kept the company’s revenue increasing at a stunning pace.
Earlier this week, Bloomberg reported that Cursor’s annual revenue had grown to more than $2 billion, doubling over the past three months.