Apps & Consumer
Cursor launches Automations to manage agentic coding workflows
Cursor launched "Automations," a new tool that automatically triggers coding agents, as the company reports annual revenue of more than $2 billion.
On Thursday, AI-powered code editor company Cursor launched a new tool called Automations. The system is designed to help software engineers manage agentic coding by automatically triggering AI agents. Instead of requiring manual prompts to start every task, the tool allows users to automatically launch agents based on specific triggers, such as code additions to a codebase, Slack messages, or timers. The tool is intended to help engineers manage the complexity of overseeing multiple agents simultaneously.
The tool aims to shift engineers away from the constant “prompt-and-monitor” dynamic of managing multiple AI agents. Jonas Nelle, Cursor’s engineering chief for asynchronous agents, described the new workflow as a system where humans act as reviewers rather than initiators. “It’s not that humans are completely out of the picture. It’s that they aren’t always initiating. They’re called in at the right points in this conveyor belt,” Nelle said. According to Nelle, while a human could theoretically initiate any task that an automation kicks off, making the process automatic changes the types of tasks that models can usefully perform within a codebase.
Cursor estimates that it already runs hundreds of automations per hour. Beyond basic code reviews, the system is being used for incident response. For example, incidents on PagerDuty, an incident response platform, can trigger an agent to immediately query server logs through a Model Context Protocol (MCP) connection. A separate automation offers weekly summaries of changes to the codebase on Cursor’s company Slack. Josh Ma, an engineering lead at Cursor, noted that the approach of thinking harder and spending more tokens to find harder issues has been really valuable.
The launch comes amid competition in the agentic coding space, where rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic have also updated their tools. Despite this competition, Cursor’s growth has continued:
- Revenue: Earlier this week, Bloomberg reported that Cursor’s annual revenue has grown to more than $2 billion, doubling over the past three months.
- Market Share: Data from financial services and data company Ramp indicates that Cursor holds roughly 25% of the market share of generative AI clients.
Why it matters
As agentic coding tools proliferate, engineers are struggling to manage the complexity of overseeing dozens of agents simultaneously. Cursor’s new automation system aims to reduce this cognitive load by automating agent initiation.