What We've Learned Building Cloud Agents
Cursor, Tuesday, June 2nd, 2026
Cursor shares key lessons from a year of developing cloud agents, focusing on environment setup, reliability, and decoupling architecture.
Cursor's blog post details lessons learned from building cloud agents over the past year. The company discovered that the development environment is the most critical factor for agent output quality, requiring substantial infrastructure rebuilding including VM hibernation, checkpointing, and enterprise-grade IT capabilities.
Cloud agents demand durable execution primitives to survive infrastructure disruptions; Cursor migrated to Temporal to achieve multi-nine reliability and now handles over 50 million actions daily.
The team learned to decouple agents, machines, and conversation state, allowing flexible pod management and client synchronization. Finally, Cursor emphasized moving logic from the harness into agent-controlled tools as models improve, while maintaining specialized scaffolding for capabilities like computer use that models aren't yet ready to handle independently.