Cursor AI Editor Launches Long-Running Agents, Raises Prices
The AI-first code editor Cursor has introduced long-running agents for its Ultra+ users, enabling automated tasks that can span hours or days with minimal supervision. The launch was accompanied by a significant price increase, with some plans reportedly rising by over 20 times, sparking backlash from indie developers. The new agents are positioned for complex work like large-scale refactoring or test generation, further pushing the boundaries of autonomous coding workflows.
- The company behind Cursor, Anysphere, was founded in 2022 by four MIT students and has experienced hyper-growth, reaching a valuation of $29.3 billion by late 2025 on the back of more than $3.3 billion in total venture funding. - The recent price adjustment follows a controversial shift in mid-2025, when the company moved its $20 Pro plan from a fixed number of requests to a usage-based credit pool tied to API costs, which led to a community backlash after some users exhausted their subscriptions unexpectedly. - The new agents function differently from AI assistants like GitHub Copilot by proposing a high-level plan for approval before executing complex, multi-day tasks; one user reported compressing a quarter-long project into a 52-hour agent run. - In internal benchmarks, Cursor demonstrated the scale of its new agentic system by sustaining over 1,000 commits per hour across hundreds of parallel agents for a week, using them to build entire applications like a web browser from scratch. - Unlike the fully autonomous agent Devin, which operates through a Slack-based interface for $500/month, Cursor's agents are integrated directly into its VS Code-forked IDE to maintain a "developer-in-the-loop" workflow. - Access to the long-running agents is exclusively for users on the new higher-cost tiers, specifically the $200/month "Ultra" plan and the $40/user/month Teams plan. - Cursor's core technical strategy was to fork VS Code and rebuild the editor natively around AI, a choice that enables deep codebase awareness and multi-file edits, differentiating it from competitors that operate as plugins with more limited context. -
