On Oct 26 Cursor announced that its Agent SDK is generally available. An agent's system prompt is written in Markdown and its tools in TypeScript; agents can be deployed on Cursor's hosted infrastructure or run on your own machines, and built-in evals measure every change. Cursor's docs say it uses the same Cursor SDK harness that powers Bugbot, Security Review, Approval Bot and Rollouts, can be triggered from source-control events, issue trackers, Slack or schedules, and is managed under Deployed Agents after deployment. Cursor has not published pricing or benchmarks.
Key Takeaways
- ✓Same harness: Cursor's docs say Agent SDK runs on the harness behind four of its own agents: Bugbot, Security Review, Approval Bot and Rollouts
- ✓Project layout: bot/instructions.md is the required always-on system prompt, each bot/tools/*.ts file is one typed tool, with folders for skills, MCP connections, subagents, channels, hooks and schedules, and evals live in evals/*.eval.ts
- ✓Triggers and deployment: runs can be triggered from source control, issue trackers, Slack, webhooks or schedules; deploy on Cursor-managed hosting or self-host, then manage under Deployed Agents
- ✓CLI: agent-sdk validate, run and eval check the project, run a real turn and run evals; Cursor says only run and eval need a Cursor credential
- ✓Cursor has not published pricing or benchmarks
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Background and pain points
When teams build their own agents, prompts often live in admin consoles, each tool integration is hand-rolled, and a one-line prompt edit can quietly break behavior with no regression tests to catch it. Cursor already used one harness internally for agents like Bugbot and Security Review, and AICoder covered an extension for its BDK on Oct 13. Now Cursor has announced on X that Agent SDK is generally available, opening that approach to all developers: agent behavior becomes files in the repo that are reviewed, tested and shipped like ordinary code.
Architecture highlights
Per the official docs, an Agent SDK project is a folder of Markdown and TypeScript. bot/instructions.md is the required always-on system prompt, each .ts file under bot/tools/ defines one typed tool, and there are folders for skills (procedures loaded on demand), MCP connections, subagents, channels (HTTP routes), hooks (observe-only event subscribers) and schedules. Developers write the prompts and tools while Cursor handles the model loop, tool calls, sessions, sandboxing, secrets and deployment, on Cursor-managed hosting or your own infrastructure. Triggers include source-control events, issue trackers, Slack threads, custom webhooks and schedules.
Benchmarks
This is a developer-tool release. Cursor published no benchmarks, and the docs we checked list no pricing. The built-in evals are each project's own evals/*.eval.ts regression tests for scoring your agent, not comparable public benchmark results.
Getting started for developers
The docs suggest running agent-sdk validate on the project, calling tools directly with agent-sdk tool call to confirm they return the right evidence, running one real turn with agent-sdk run and reading the printed session trace, then running smoke evals with agent-sdk eval, followed by a TypeScript check. Cursor says only run and eval need a Cursor credential. You can also have a coding agent in your checkout scaffold a first version with skills such as bdk-create-agent. It fits internal agents for PR review, release approval or on-call help that connect to GitHub, Slack and issue trackers.
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