Cursor Automations: Always-On Agents Triggered by Slack, PRs, and PagerDuty
Cursor launched Automations — an event-driven agentic coding system that runs continuously in the background without manual prompting, triggered by commits, Slack messages, and incidents.
Cursor just flipped the model on AI coding assistants. Instead of “open the editor, write a prompt, wait for output,” Automations runs agents continuously in the background — triggered by events in your existing workflow, not by you manually switching context.
The shift matters: an agent that fires when you commit code, open a PR, or get paged at 2am is fundamentally different infrastructure than a coding copilot.
What Triggers an Automation
Cursor Automations can fire on:
- New code commits — Bugbot runs on every addition to the codebase, flags new issues without you asking
- Opened PRs — review and analysis agents run automatically
- Merged PRs — downstream impact analysis, documentation updates
- GitHub issues — triage agents classify, reproduce, and propose fixes
- Slack messages — mention
@cursorin a channel to dispatch an agent on a task - PagerDuty incidents — incident responder agent fires automatically when you get paged
The PagerDuty integration is the most production-grade use case here. When an incident fires, the agent queries logs via MCP, assembles a regression timeline correlating the incident with recent deploys, and proposes a hotfix branch — before you’ve finished waking up.
MCP as the Connective Tissue
The log querying in the PagerDuty integration runs through MCP (Model Context Protocol). This is the architectural signal worth paying attention to: Cursor isn’t building custom integrations for every data source. They’re using MCP as the standard interface between agents and real infrastructure.
For builders, this means: any MCP server you’ve built or connected is automatically available to Cursor Automations. Your internal tools, databases, and APIs become part of the agent’s reachable environment without additional integration work.
The “Always-On” Architecture Change
Most AI coding tools are request-response: you prompt, the model responds, session ends. Automations is persistent process: the agent subscribes to event streams and maintains state across multiple actions.
This changes what’s possible:
- Bugbot can track issues it found two commits ago and check if they got fixed
- Incident responders can correlate across time windows, not just the current log dump
- PR reviewers can compare against previous reviews on the same codebase
Cursor reports processing hundreds of automations per hour internally. That’s a real reliability benchmark — this isn’t a demo feature.
What to Start With
If you’re evaluating Automations, Bugbot is the lowest-risk entry point. Enable it on a non-critical repo, let it run for a week, and measure the signal-to-noise on its findings. If the findings are useful, expand to PR automation. Save the PagerDuty integration for after you’ve built trust in the system’s judgment.
Automations is available now in Cursor for teams on the Business plan.
Source: TechCrunch — “Cursor is rolling out a new system for agentic coding,” March 5, 2026