Cursor turns cloud agents into an always-on event-driven system

Cursor shipped a release that turns cloud agents from on-demand sessions into an always-on system that builds and ships software on its own. The core primitive is Subscriptions: an agent subscribes to an event source such as a PR, a Slack thread, or a schedule, and wakes when something happens. Agents automatically subscribe to the PRs they create and drive them to completion, fixing CI and addressing bot comments; this is cloud-agents-only for now. The same release adds custom modes (any skill pinned as an always-on mode in chat), subagents that each run on their own VM with an isolated project copy and clean context (swarm patterns supported), and /goal, a long-lived objective the agent works toward until complete, pairable with custom modes and /loop. Steering changed too: follow-up messages now queue until the next tool call instead of interrupting the agent mid-action.

This is the most complete commercial packaging yet of the always-on multi-agent runtime pattern: event-driven wake-up, VM-per-subagent isolation for clean-context parallel work, long-lived goals, and non-interrupt steering are exactly the primitives an autonomous coding fleet needs. The auto-subscribed, PR-driving agent also closes the loop with Cursor's own hosting (Origin) and CI integrations, so one vendor now covers repo → review → CI → always-on agents. For teams considering it, the caveats are concrete: deeper lock-in to Cursor's cloud stack, real compute cost from swarm parallelism, and guardrails needed before autonomous PR-driving agents point at production repositories.