Cursor 3.8 Adds /automate Skill, Slack Emoji Triggers, and Computer Use for Cloud Agents

Cursor 3.8 landed on June 18 with a round of improvements to Automations, the always-on agent system the company has been building out over the past few months. The update adds a new way to create automations from within a local session, expands the trigger options, and turns on computer use for cloud agents by default.

The /automate Skill

The most straightforward addition is /automate, a new slash command you can use inside a local agent session to set up an automation without opening the Automations UI. Describe what you want the automation to do in plain language, and Cursor configures the triggers, instructions, and tools for you.

This lowers the setup cost for one-off automations. Instead of navigating to the Automations panel, picking triggers, writing instructions, and saving, you can just tell the agent what you want and let it build the automation for you.

Slack Emoji Triggers

You can now react to any Slack message with a designated emoji to kick off an automation. Cursor uses this internally for triggering specific workflows from Slack without leaving the conversation. You configure which emoji maps to which automation, and any message in the channel that gets that reaction becomes a trigger.

Five New GitHub Triggers

The release adds five new GitHub event types that can fire automations:

• Issue comments on non-PR issues
• PR review inline comments
• PR review submissions
• Review thread status changes (resolved or unresolved)
• GitHub Actions workflow completion

The GitHub Actions trigger is particularly useful for automated workflows that need to respond to CI results. When a workflow finishes, the automation can run a follow-up: post a summary, open a ticket, apply a fix, or anything else in the agent’s toolset.

Computer Use for Cloud Agents

Computer use is now enabled by default for cloud agents kicked off by automations. The agent can spin up its own browser session, interact with web interfaces, produce screenshots and recordings, and attach those as artifacts to the PR it opens.

The practical case is demo creation: after writing code for a new feature, the agent can launch the app, click through it to verify it works, record a video, and include the recording in the pull request so reviewers can see what the feature does without running it themselves.

Other Changes

Automations can now be saved in an incomplete state. If you need to navigate away mid-setup to configure MCP authentication, your progress is preserved. Previously, leaving the setup flow mid-way would discard everything.

Automations can now open PRs by default without you specifying that tool explicitly in the UI. It was an easy thing to forget in the configuration, and it now works out of the box.

You can also delete memory files through the Automations UI, or prompt the agent to delete outdated memories during a run.

Two new marketplace templates ship with the release: one for triaging failed GitHub Actions and one for auto-fixing PR review comments.

Source: Cursor changelog — June 18, 2026