First look at Cursor background agents (multiple agents in the cloud)

Key Takeaways

Let's take a look at background agents in cursor. This new feature that's very similar to OpenAI codeex and jewels which has just been released by Google. So we're going to go into cursor settings and then in the beta tab we have background agent here which we need to make sure is enabled which it is. Close that and we can open this up and we have this cloud here. So we need to set up the environment first. I haven't actually used this yet. So, we're going to go through the setup really quickly. Okay. So, yeah, it runs on machines in the cloud. I need to connect to GitHub. So, I've authenticated with GitHub and now it's doing its thing. Setting up the cloud machine may take a while. I can hide that. So, what I'm going to do is run a couple of tasks on playbook. So, I have playbooks here. One thing that I noticed is if I drag this down to mobile view here, the rules item here is not in line with the rest, which is annoying. And also on mobile here, if I try and click this as a dropown, it just reloads the page because I don't I'm not sure why. So, it shouldn't do that. So, that's the first thing that I want to fix. And the second thing I want to do on the MCP's page here where I have my listing of my MCPS, I want to add an advert for my boiler plate that I have my MCP boiler plate which I just made open source. So they're the two tasks that we're going to try and do inside cursor. So this is finished setting up. Let's have a look. Okay, so it's running here. What does it need? take a snapshot of your environment. Okay, let's do that. Configure runtime. I don't need to do any of this just yet. We're just going to keep it very simple for the for the test run. And eventually, I presume a lot of this stuff will just get abstracted out and not shown because I don't really care about setting up the cloud machine. I just want to be able to click. Okay, this is an exact copy of the environment the background agent will be started in. Please make sure our llinters are working. So, I'm just going to say that everything works here. Okay. So, we'll store the file. Let's do a new agent. So, if I go back over here, let's uh minimize this down. Click that. Take a screenshot here. Place that. And then back in the agent, paste this. So, the rules drop down. isn't in line with the other items. Can we fix Okay, so that's gone, but it doesn't really show me where it's gone. Background agent show background agent history open control panel. Okay, so here we have a control panel here. This is align rule drop down with other items and this one is is cooking here. So I can close with escape. In the meantime, let's go back to the MCP's page here. Then we'll take a screenshot of this new background agent. I want to place an ad as the third item in MCP index. this one here in the front end. Uh for now, just do a dummy dummy ad in the exact same card layout as the existing MCP servers. Then we'll send that off as well. So now we can see here, look, we've got this one is cooking now. It's creating the environment. This one's running. So we can go back in and see what's happening. Okay, it's looking things up, looking up components. It's running in the background. While that's doing that, we might as well have a little look here and see if there's anything else that I fancy doing. I don't think there is. I'm happy to just do two two jobs. And then once it's done the MCP add here, we can then do another task to update it. See what the background agents doing here. Open the control panel. Okay. So the align rules dropdown with other items now has a pull request. So let's create that pull request. So that's going to create that in GitHub. It takes us straight here to refactor this with all the file changes that we need here. So, we'll create that. And then what we want to do really is check it out locally. Background agent finished. Yeah, it's fine. And then let's check. Look at that. It's done it. Now close the terminal. Let's go to background agent history. This one here. Now it says create pull request, but I have created the pull request and I've already checked it out. So that's a little bit confusing. So here's the pull request here and it works. So I'm going to merge that in. Confirm that. Maybe I just tell the agent. Okay, that worked. I merged PR. What now? So, it's still showing me create pull request here and over here. So in codeex which is chatgpt alternative to this it will it will update and tell you in the UI that it's actually been merged in. Okay. So I'm guessing I just need to close that one. So now I want to do this add the dummy text one. So let's create a pull request for that one. Okay. Okay. So, it's added a add there. So, we'll create the pull request. Okay. Now, we'll check this out locally. And now we have the sponsored one here. Look at that. That's perfect. That's actually perfect. It's cooking. So, we'll open the pull request. So, the link in the sidebar does show it, just not in the overview. So, we'll go back. We'll confirm that that's merged in. So, we'll get rid of that and we'll go back to the agent history. Open the control panel. Insert a place. That's done. Okay, let's do a new one. And now we need to I want to go back and grab the MCP boiler plate here. Okay. Update the dummy ad to link to my MCP boiler plate URL is that description and anything else we need what we want to call it. What I might do just for ls is use u here. If you see this, it takes the entire codebase into one file that you can add to cursor. Take that and then we'll just add the file at the link there and say use any language needed to make this ad compelling. So we can use all the context of the codebase to do that. Okay. So, command semicolon opens the control panel. So, if I get rid of that, escape that, and then go command semicolon, we're in. That's a shortcut for it. Update ad to promote MCP boiler plate. This one's just generating now. Figuring it all out. And see, I haven't told it anything about where the file is. It's just gonna have to figure it out. And it seems to be doing that. So, pretty pretty cool. So, you can see now I could literally have multiple tabs just doing a bunch of stuff here. This feels pretty slick. Feels It's definitely feels much slicker than both Codeex and Jules. mainly because I can like one click check out and use the branch that it's created in the pull request to test. I don't have to leave cursor to do this. What would be great is if rather than me having to create the pull request in GitHub, if I click this button here, it should just create it and publish it and then I can check it out. I don't really even want to go to GitHub from this link. I just want it to do it for me so I don't have to leave cursor. That's because for me cursor at the minute really is my everything app. I write code in here. I write content in here. I'm using MCP servers. I sometimes publish content to social media using MCP servers in cursor. So everything I do is really in here. So everything the cursor team can do to keep me inside the editor would be perfect. So let's create the pull request. So, it's making the change here. We'll create that. Head back. Check it out locally. And now we have the MCP boiler plate. Build a Cloudflare MCP server with OR and Stripe in minutes. Get the boiler plate and it links straight to my GitHub repo. That is perfect. Hopefully that will get me some more stars and we can get to 500. And again, like it would be great if rather than having to open the pull request here, go down and merge it. It would be great if I could just click merge in GitHub and in in cursor. And I guess I could here realistically. I could do it through the git the source control integration, but I would prefer to just have it here. I don't want to be figuring out where I need to go. I don't really use the GitHub source control stuff here. So, it' be great to have it just as part of the background agent. So, now that all those changes have been made, I can come to Laravel Forge and I hit deploy. When deployment is done, we can go back to playbooks.coms. Here's my ad. Perfect. And if we resize this down, the rules are working. And obviously, I can work on making this actually clickable. But that's it. That's how you can use background agent inside cursor. And it this works so much better than codeex for me because I'm already in this environment. I already know there's obviously a few little things like like now for example this has already been merged in. How do I update it? Do I refresh it? Uh what does this mean? Finished. So it doesn't it doesn't fully show me the context of like what happens once I've merged these in. It would be great if you could say this is merged in. checkout back to main now because I'm still here on that branch. So, what I should be doing really is get checkout main and then get pull to get all the changes in. So, it would be great if I didn't have to do all that stuff and I could just get it working just through the background agent being able to maintain awareness of what's happened with the pull requests and the merges and stuff like that. If we go back to command semicolon, can now close these. We can close that. Close that. Close that. And now I'm ready to cook with my next tasks. If you want me to do any more videos going into more detail with the background agent in cursor, please let me know. I think I'm probably going to use this and cancel my OpenAI Pro subscription. It just doesn't make sense when I'm already paying cursor and getting so much value from it that I can now just use this as well. And and also I didn't have any conflicts on this one. I guess I was working in different files. So, it will be interesting maybe in another video to do a bunch of changes on the same files and see how cursor can handle those conflicts because that's one thing in codeex that didn't work as well. But yeah, if you like this video, give it a thumbs up and subscribe to my channel and I'll try and do more of these. There's just so many new things being released that it's hard to keep up, but I'll try.