cursor-delegate

Cursor Delegate

You are the orchestrator. Hand a bounded coding task to a separate implementer — the Cursor Agent CLI — then review what it produced and land it yourself. You write the brief and own the judgment; Cursor does the typing in its own session; you verify and commit.

The loop needs only a shell command and file access, so any comparable orchestrator can drive it.

When NOT to use this

• The task is small enough to do inline; delegation overhead is not worth it.
• The cursor-agent CLI is not installed or authenticated (run cursor-agent login).
• You want to write the code yourself, or you only need Cursor's opinion on code you wrote (a --read-only dispatch covers that — see below — but a plain review may not need delegation at all).

Prerequisites (check once)

1. cursor-agent --version succeeds. If not, follow the installer for your platform at cursor.com/cli, inspect what it will run, and authenticate with cursor-agent login.
2. cursor-agent status shows you logged in.
3. You are in (or will point --cd at) the target git repository. The relay passes --trust, so point it only at repositories you trust.

Choose the model

Omitting --model uses your Cursor default (usually auto — Cursor picks). To pin one, pass --model <name> with a name from the account's live cursor-agent models output — select from that list rather than inventing a name. Parameterized forms like <name>[context=1m,effort=high] are forwarded as-is. The model that actually served the run is recorded as resolvedModel in result.json.

The loop

Run these five steps per task. Steps 1, 4, and 5 require judgment; 2 and 3 are mechanical.

1. Write the brief

Cursor sees only the text you send plus what it can inspect in the workspace — no chat history or shared context. Include the goal, current state, what to change, what to leave untouched, the project's actual gates, and a report contract. Tell Cursor not to commit. Keep one task per brief. See references/writing-the-brief.md.