Summary
On August 19, 2026, Cursor expanded its cloud agents and harness so agents can run as an always-on system: they subscribe to events such as pull requests and Slack threads, hold a long-lived objective through a new /goal command, run subagents on isolated virtual machines, and accept mid-run steering without being interrupted.
What changed
Cursor's August 19 update added Subscriptions (agents wake on PR, Slack-thread, and scheduled-task events and automatically handle the PRs they create, including fixing CI failures and bot comments), Custom Modes (pin a skill as an always-on mode to keep an agent focused), isolated subagents that run on dedicated VMs with independent project copies and clean context, a /goal command for long-lived objectives such as '/goal fix all flaky tests and make CI green', and steering that queues follow-ups for the next tool call instead of cutting the agent off mid-action.
Why it matters
It moves Cursor from prompt-response coding toward autonomous, event-driven agents that pick up and finish work without per-loop human intervention, reinforcing the industry shift to background and cloud coding agents as a first-class product surface rather than an inline autocomplete.
Evidence excerpt
"cloud agents can automatically pick up work in response to events, hold a goal until it's met, and stay on course through long-running sessions."