Tag: llm

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.

Stop shipping SKILL.md folders inside every agent deployment. Serve them from an MCP server and pull them with UseMcpSkills on Microsoft.Agents.AI.Mcp 1.18. Includes the exact skill://index.json shape, a working C# server, the wire trace, and the SEP-2640 drift that will bite you.

Since August 3, 2026 you can pick a reasoning level next to the model when you start a Copilot cloud agent task. The Agent Tasks REST API has no equivalent parameter, so scripted dispatch cannot set it. Here is where the control exists, which levels each model exposes, what lands on the wire, and how to pin a default instead.

Agent Plugins 1.0 says plugin.json at the root and mcp.json beside it. Claude Code 2.1.x wants .claude-plugin/plugin.json and .mcp.json. Here is what each client actually loads, tested against a real plugin, and the dual-layout directory that satisfies both.

A write tool that asks before it writes needs three things the MCP SDK does not give you: an approval bound to the exact diff, a precondition on the file it previewed, and an integrity-protected requestState. Verified end to end on @modelcontextprotocol/server 2.0.0 against protocol revision 2026-07-28, including the argument-swap that gets past a naive confirm.

Mapping 200 internal REST endpoints to 200 MCP tools puts 200 KB of JSON schema in front of every request. The 2026-07-28 spec also made the usual escape hatch illegal: tools/list MUST NOT vary per-connection, so per-session dynamic registration is gone. Here are the three levers that still work, with measured wire sizes and verified code on @modelcontextprotocol/server 2.0.0.

The 1M-token context window is now the default on Claude Opus 5, Opus 4.8/4.7/4.6, Sonnet 5, and Sonnet 4.6, with no beta header and no long-context premium. Here is when deleting the vector store actually pays off, the 10x cache-read rule that decides it, the ~30% tokenizer inflation that breaks your sizing estimate, and the seven-step migration with a verification line on each one.

The GitHub, Postgres, and Slack MCP servers from modelcontextprotocol/servers were archived in 2025 and their npm packages are deprecated. They pin SDK 1.0.1, which cannot negotiate past protocol 2024-11-05. Here is the audit script, the current replacement for each, and the two pointers in the archive README that are themselves stale.

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.