Image: Cursor / releases.sh Cursor 3.11 Adds Side Chats That Run Alongside Your Agent and Search Across All Past Conversations
Cursor's July 10 update introduces side chats — separate conversation threads that run in parallel with your main agent without interrupting it — plus full-text search across agent transcripts, redesigned project and repo pickers, and new hooks for observing and controlling cloud agent behavior.
Cursor shipped version 3.11 on July 10. The two standout features are side chats and conversation search, both aimed at making it less disruptive to investigate things while an agent is already running.
Side chats that don’t interrupt the main agent
The central addition is side chats: separate conversation threads you can open alongside your main agent session using /side, /btw, or a plus button at the top of the chat panel.
A side chat has full context from the main conversation, so you can ask follow-up questions or sanity-check a decision without stopping what the agent is doing. Each side chat is a complete agent session with its own persistent history. You can revisit it later, continue the thread, or at-mention it from the main chat to pull that context back in.
By default, side chats lean toward reading, searching, and answering rather than making changes. The idea is to handle the investigative work while leaving execution to the main thread.
Searching agent transcripts
You can now search across your entire history of agent conversations from the command palette (Cmd+K) inside the Agents Window. Cursor also added per-conversation search with Cmd+F, which shows match counts and lets you navigate between hits. If you’ve been using Cursor heavily for a few months, this addresses a real problem: finding a specific thing you worked on two weeks ago used to involve a lot of scrolling.
Redesigned project and repo pickers
The project and repo pickers have been redesigned to let you complete setup workflows without leaving the picker. You can create new projects, connect GitHub, GitLab, or Azure DevOps repositories, and browse by location (This Computer, Cloud, or remote machines) without navigating to a separate settings page. The old global search box is gone; search is now scoped by location.
Cloud agent hooks
Developers building on top of Cursor can now use hooks to observe and control agent behavior at specific points in the conversation:
beforeSubmitPrompt— runs before a prompt is sentafterAgentResponse— runs after the agent respondsafterAgentThought— runs after each reasoning step
These are designed for things like reasoning visibility and self-correcting loops, where you want to inspect or modify what’s happening between steps rather than just getting a final result.
Full changelog is at cursor.com/changelog/side-chat.