Agent Execution Timed Out in Agents/Glass with project folders (Classic works; No-Repo Agents works) — Windows 3.18.9

Support Bug Reports
,
1

Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

Cursor IDE

Describe the Bug

ERROR_EXTENSION_HOST_TIMEOUT / “Agent Execution Timed Out” happens reliably in the Agents/Glass UI when the chat is bound to a real project folder.

Same machine works fine with:

  1. Classic editor (Cursor.exe --classic) + same project
  2. Agents window + No Repo / home chat (no project folder)

This does not look like account/network/model failure. Local logs show the project workbench Extension Host becomes unresponsive within a few seconds and never finishes registering cursor-agent-exec.

Side symptoms when it fails: @ file picker fails, git branch is not auto-detected (same Extension Host).

Steps to Reproduce

  1. Launch Cursor in the default Agents/Glass UI.
  2. Open or select a real local project/git folder.
  3. Start a new Agent chat bound to that repo and send any message.
  4. Within ~1 minute: Agent Execution Timed Out.
  5. Optionally compare: same project in Classic works; No-Repo Agents chat works.

Expected Behavior

Agents window with a project folder should register the agent execution provider reliably, same as Classic. @ file mentions and git branch detection should also work.

Operating System

Windows 10/11

Version Information

Cursor 3.18.9 (stable), Windows, install path D:\cursor\Cursor.exe

For AI issues: add Request ID with privacy disabled

c6e501ea-53b3-4eea-8867-94c4876ab129
b49d6e27-2370-450e-9e7a-144941bec282
ad0c79b4-f11d-463c-83b2-96341361d7f8
82f4e11b-ca28-4872-a432-76a3b7f252e8

Additional Information

Log pattern (local %APPDATA%\Cursor\logs):

  • Agents UI creates multiple workbenches (wb0/wb1/wb2…).
  • Empty/home workbench often activates anysphere.cursor-agent-exec successfully.
  • Project workbench Extension Host becomes unresponsive within a few seconds.
  • UI retries: [agent-exec] Provider registration timed out (attempt 1/9 … 8/9).
  • agentExec.waitForProviderRegistration ~70s (e.g. durationMs≈70622 / 70763).
  • Also saw: Draft workspace archived errors around submit time.

Already ruled out:

  • Cleared ~/.cursor/mcp.json to empty mcpServers; no MCP child processes.
  • Uninstalled Figma plugin / disabled MCPs; issue still reproduces for Agents+project.
  • Not specific to one repo.

Please investigate Agents/Glass multi-workbench Extension Host hangs on Windows 3.18.9 when a project folder is attached. Classic is currently the only stable path for project work. Happy to provide full renderer.log / exthost.log if needed.

Does this stop you from using Cursor

Sometimes - I can sometimes use Cursor

9

Hey @liuyi

We dug into exactly which operations hang when the Agents window times out on your machine, and they’re surprisingly mundane: plain file reads inside the project folder (e.g. reading .git/HEAD), and launching git itself. Each of these takes multiple seconds on your machine, stalling the component that runs agents.

That points strongly at something machine-local slowing down file access in that folder. The usual suspects are:

Could you run the following and report the numbers?

Open PowerShell, cd into the affected project folder, then run:

cd <path-to-affected-project>

Measure-Command { git status }
Measure-Command { git submodule status }
Measure-Command { Get-Content .git\HEAD }

Even better if you can run these from a terminal inside Cursor, and compare to one outside of Cursor.