Cursor is rolling out a new kind of agentic coding tool | TechCrunch

As agentic coding spreads, the working life of a software engineer has become dazzlingly complex. A single engineer might oversee dozens of coding agents at once, launching and guiding different processes as necessary. 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, the new system gives users a way to automatically launch agents within their coding environment, triggered by a new addition to the codebase, a Slack message, or a simple timer. As Cursor describes it, it’s a way to 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,” Jonas Nelle, Cursor’s engineering chief for asynchronous agents told TechCrunch in an interview. ”It’s that they aren’t always initiating. They’re called in at the right points in this conveyor belt.” One early example is Bugbot, a long-standing Cursor feature that the team sees as a predecessor to the broader Automation system. The Bugbot system is triggered every time an engineer m...