Image: Cursor / cursor.com Cursor's Cloud Agents Can Now Watch Your PRs and Slack Threads
Cursor's August 19 changelog adds event subscriptions so cloud agents wake automatically on pull requests, Slack threads, or scheduled tasks without you re-prompting them.
Cursor’s August 19 update adds something that changes how cloud agents work: they can now subscribe to events and wake up when those events happen, without you having to re-prompt them.
The core feature is called Subscriptions. An agent subscribes to an event source, such as a pull request thread or a Slack conversation, and ends its turn. When something new happens in that source, the agent wakes and picks up where it left off. Cursor says cloud agents will automatically subscribe to PRs they create and drive them through to completion, including fixing CI failures and responding to bot comments.
This is a meaningful shift. Previously, a cloud agent session was something you explicitly started and watched. Now an agent can hold a goal across time and trigger on external state changes rather than on your next message.
Three other things shipped alongside Subscriptions:
The /goal command lets you give an agent a long-lived objective. The example Cursor uses is “fix all flaky tests and make CI green.” The agent works toward that until it’s done, persisting the goal across sessions rather than treating it as a one-turn task.
Subagents now run on isolated VMs. Each subagent gets a clean copy of the project in its own cloud environment, which means parallel subagents can’t step on each other. This matters for anything that involves writing to shared state or running tests.
Steering messages now queue instead of interrupting. If you send a follow-up message while an agent is mid-task, it holds that message and processes it at the next tool call boundary rather than stopping what it’s doing. You can guide without disrupting.
These features continue a pattern Cursor has been building since its acquisition. Origin, the code hosting platform that began rolling out August 17, added GitHub sync and PR management. Event-driven agents make a natural complement: the agents that create PRs can now also track and resolve them.
Sources:
- Cloud Agents and Cursor Harness Improvements — Cursor Changelog
- Cursor Event-Driven Cloud Agents: What Actually Changed — explainx.ai
- Cursor gives cloud agents subscriptions, /goal and subagent VMs — AI Weekly