Cursor launches new agentic coding assistant

As agentic coding becomes more widespread, the daily work of software engineers has grown remarkably intricate. A single engineer may now manage dozens of coding agents simultaneously, initiating and steering various processes as needed.
Keeping track of it all is a significant challenge, and human attention has swiftly become the scarcest resource.
On Thursday, Cursor introduced a new tool designed to manage this complexity. Called Automations, the system lets users automatically launch agents within their coding environment. Triggers can include a new addition to the codebase, a Slack message, or a simple timer. According to Cursor, it's a solution for reviewing and maintaining all the new code generated by agentic tools—without having to manually oversee dozens of agents at once.
At its core, Automations help engineers move beyond the "prompt-and-monitor" pattern common in agent-based development. Instead of manually prompting agents, Cursor's framework allows agents to launch automatically, bringing humans into the loop only when necessary.
"Humans aren't completely removed from the process," Jonas Nelle, Cursor's engineering lead for asynchronous agents, explained in an interview with TechCrunch. "They're just not always the ones initiating. They're brought in at the right points along the conveyor belt."
An early example is Bugbot, a longstanding Cursor feature seen as a precursor to the broader Automation system. Bugbot activates whenever an engineer adds new code, reviewing it for bugs and other problems. Using Automations, Cursor has expanded this capability to include more comprehensive security audits and in-depth reviews.
"The concept of investing more computational effort, using more tokens to uncover harder-to-find issues, has proven extremely valuable," said engineering lead Josh Ma.
Cursor estimates it runs hundreds of automations every hour, extending far beyond basic code review. The system also handles incident response; for instance, a PagerDuty alert can trigger an agent that immediately queries server logs via an MCP connection. Another automation provides weekly summaries of codebase changes directly in the company's Slack channel.
"In theory, anything an automation starts, a human could have started manually," Nelle noted. "But by automating it, you fundamentally change the kinds of tasks models can effectively perform within a codebase."
The launch comes during fierce competition in the agentic coding sector, with both OpenAI and Anthropic rolling out major updates to their own agentic tools in the past month.
Ramp data indicates Cursor's market share has remained stable since May, with approximately 25% of generative AI clients subscribing to Cursor in some form.
Nevertheless, the rapid expansion of the agentic coding market continues to drive the company's revenue growth at an impressive rate. Earlier this week, Bloomberg reported that Cursor's annual revenue has surpassed $2 billion, doubling over the last three months.
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As agentic coding becomes more widespread, the daily work of software engineers has grown remarkably intricate. A single engineer may now manage dozens of coding agents simultaneously, initiating and steering various processes as needed.
Keeping track of it all is a significant challenge, and human attention has swiftly become the scarcest resource.
On Thursday, Cursor introduced a new tool designed to manage this complexity. Called Automations, the system lets users automatically launch agents within their coding environment. Triggers can include a new addition to the codebase, a Slack message, or a simple timer. According to Cursor, it's a solution for reviewing and maintaining all the new code generated by agentic tools—without having to manually oversee dozens of agents at once.
At its core, Automations help engineers move beyond the "prompt-and-monitor" pattern common in agent-based development. Instead of manually prompting agents, Cursor's framework allows agents to launch automatically, bringing humans into the loop only when necessary.
"Humans aren't completely removed from the process," Jonas Nelle, Cursor's engineering lead for asynchronous agents, explained in an interview with TechCrunch. "They're just not always the ones initiating. They're brought in at the right points along the conveyor belt."
An early example is Bugbot, a longstanding Cursor feature seen as a precursor to the broader Automation system. Bugbot activates whenever an engineer adds new code, reviewing it for bugs and other problems. Using Automations, Cursor has expanded this capability to include more comprehensive security audits and in-depth reviews.
"The concept of investing more computational effort, using more tokens to uncover harder-to-find issues, has proven extremely valuable," said engineering lead Josh Ma.
Cursor estimates it runs hundreds of automations every hour, extending far beyond basic code review. The system also handles incident response; for instance, a PagerDuty alert can trigger an agent that immediately queries server logs via an MCP connection. Another automation provides weekly summaries of codebase changes directly in the company's Slack channel.
"In theory, anything an automation starts, a human could have started manually," Nelle noted. "But by automating it, you fundamentally change the kinds of tasks models can effectively perform within a codebase."
The launch comes during fierce competition in the agentic coding sector, with both OpenAI and Anthropic rolling out major updates to their own agentic tools in the past month.
Ramp data indicates Cursor's market share has remained stable since May, with approximately 25% of generative AI clients subscribing to Cursor in some form.
Nevertheless, the rapid expansion of the agentic coding market continues to drive the company's revenue growth at an impressive rate. Earlier this week, Bloomberg reported that Cursor's annual revenue has surpassed $2 billion, doubling over the last three months.
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