cursor-agent

New
adopt
First Added:May 17, 2026

cursor-agent is Cursor’s terminal agent—TUI/CLI for running the same Cursor Agent in your shell, scripts, GitHub Actions, and headless automations, with frontier models and MCP. We adopt it under AI Agent as our default bounded coding agent alongside the Cursor editor: one vendor for interactive IDE work and terminal/CI agents, with skills and rules wired through .cursor/ and this vault’s research conventions (agent: cursor-agent in frontmatter).

Blurb

Ship code with agents. Right from your terminal.

Summary

The cursor-agent binary (install via Cursor’s install script) drives an agent loop in a repo: model selection (/model), shell mode, resume via cursor-agent --resume <chatId>, and cursor-agent create-chat / ls for session management. CURSOR_AGENT=1 in the environment marks agent invocations for logging and gbrain session metadata.

Use for day-to-day coding in the terminal, headless pipelines, and GitHub Actions when you already use Cursor billing. It is a repo-bounded AI Agent—not an omnichannel personal bot (OpenClaw, Hermes are hold). Pair with Cursor under IDE when you want GUI + CLI in one stack.

Compare Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, and OpenCode when a different vendor or open-source hub is required.

Details

  • Install: curl https://cursor.com/install -fsS | bash (see Cursor CLI docs for npm and platform packages).
  • Auth: Cursor subscription / team plan; CLI shares model access with the Cursor product.
  • Models: Composer, Claude, GPT, Gemini, Grok, and other frontier models exposed in the CLI picker.
  • Automation: headless mode and GitHub Actions integrations for doc updates, reviews, and custom agents.
  • Skills: .cursor/skills/ and rules; cross-reference Agent Skills - Sources for portable SKILL.md repos.
  • Fit: Tool / AI Agent—Cursor’s agent runtime in the terminal (Cursor is the editor under IDE).
  • Contrast: vendor-specific CLIs when not on Cursor; OpenCode for multi-provider open source.