cursor

Use Cursor's /goal command to keep a cloud agent working toward one finish line across many turns. Covers writing a verifiable objective, pinning a Custom Mode playbook, pairing it with /loop and subscriptions, the CLI's durable goals, and how to stop a goal that ignores Stop.

Cursor's Self-Hosted Machines, shipped September 2, 2026, move Cloud Agent tool calls onto hardware you own while inference stays in Cursor's cloud. The agent worker CLI, My Machines vs Team Pools, the three outbound hosts, and the data that still leaves your network.

The cold start of a subagent is not what costs you money. Measured across 117 real Claude Code subagent transcripts, startup context was 0.6% to 18% of each agent's total spend. Depth is expensive because every layer runs its own agentic loop and hands the layer above a summary instead of evidence. Here is the compression test that tells you which layer to delete.

Agent Plugins 1.0.0 standardizes exactly two component types: skills and MCP servers. Slash commands, hooks, subagents, rules, LSP servers, permission config and secrets all stay vendor-specific. Here is the field-by-field matrix across Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot and Codex, and which layout to author in.

A server that vanished from /mcp with no error is almost always an allowlist. Run claude mcp add on the same server: the add path prints the reason the load path swallows.

Cursor shipped Builds for Cloud Agents on August 13, 2026: a bootable filesystem snapshot of an already prepared machine. Cursor reports 3x faster time to first token. The lever you control is the install vs start split in .cursor/environment.json.

Cursor did not delete rules. It split them. This checklist sorts a .cursorrules file and a folder of .mdc rules into the four things they should be in Cursor 3.11: an AGENTS.md, a small set of surviving rules, skills, and subagents, then bundles the result as a plugin.

A step-by-step checklist for retiring a hand-rolled while-loop agent and running the same job on @cursor/sdk 1.0.26. The tool bodies survive, the loop does not, and three things you probably rely on have no equivalent: a system prompt string, a tool allowlist, and per-turn control.

Cursor Router shipped on July 22, 2026. Auto now classifies every request and routes it to a different model, and the Cost, Balance, and Intelligence modes change both the quality you get and how you are billed.

Claude Code, Cursor, and the GitHub Copilot coding agent all ship host allowlists for outbound traffic, and all three default to something looser than you want. The exact settings keys, a policy you can copy, and the four surfaces the allowlist does not cover.