Cursor is introducing a new type of proxy coding tool

With the spread of proxy encryption, the working life of a software engineer has become astonishingly complex. A single engineer may supervise dozens of cryptographic agents simultaneously, launching and directing different processes as necessary.

There is a lot to keep track of, and human engineers’ attention quickly becomes a limited resource.

The index launched a new tool on Thursday aimed at getting this chaos under control. The new system is called Automations, and it gives users a way to automatically launch agents within their programming environment, triggered by a new addition to the codebase, a Slack message, or a simple timer. As Cursor describes it, it’s a way to review and maintain all the new code generated by agent tools — without keeping track of dozens of agents at once.

At the most basic level, automations are a way for engineers to break out of the “demand and monitor” dynamic that defines most agent-based engineering. Instead of launching agents with a human mentor, Cursor’s Automation framework lets you launch agents automatically — and replicate humans when you need them.

“It’s not that humans are completely out of the picture,” Jonas Neely, head of asynchronous agent engineering at Cursor, told TechCrunch in an interview. “The problem is they don’t always take the initiative. They get called at the right points on this conveyor belt.”

One early example is Bugbot, a long-standing cursor feature that the team sees as a precedent for the broader automation system. The Bugbot system is triggered every time an engineer makes an addition to the code base, and reviews new code for bugs and other issues. Using automation, Cursor was able to expand this system to include more complex security audits and more comprehensive reviews.

“The idea of ​​thinking harder, and spending more code to find hard problems, was really valuable,” said Josh Ma, engineering lead.

Cursor estimates it runs hundreds of automations per hour, going far beyond simple code review. The system is also used for incident response, as PagerDuty incidents initiate an agent that can instantly query server logs through an MCP connection. A separate automation process provides weekly summaries of changes to the code base in Cursor’s Slack company.

“In theory, anything that automation launches, a human could launch as well,” Neely said. “But by automating it, you can usefully change the types of tasks that models can do in the code base.”

The new system comes amid intense competition in the proxy coding space, with both OpenAI and Anthropic making significant updates to their proxy coding tools in the past month.

Ramp data shows that Cursor’s market share has remained steady since May, with approximately 25% of Cursor’s production AI customers subscribing to some capacity.

However, the overall growth in the proxy programming space has seen the company’s revenues increase at an astonishing pace. Earlier this week, Bloomberg reported that Cursor’s annual revenue had grown to more than $2 billion, doubling over the past three months.