Autoresearch with Cursor CLI

Feature request for product/service

Cursor CLI

Describe the request

Has someone tried run Karpathy’s autoresearch with Cursor CLI?

I tried agent --prompt --trust --yolo "prompr here" but it does not print anything and appears to be doing nothing

I ended up using the interactive mode, but not sure if ideal

Any recommendations?

By the way, when running on a cloud VM we need to run Cursor CLI in the background using nohup so we can exist the SSH session and it continues working - how to do this?

If Cursor could support this, it would be awesome!

Hi Bernardo,

It’s the flag name: --prompt isn’t a valid Cursor CLI flag. For non-interactive/headless runs you want --print (or -p). Without it, the agent won’t print to stdout, so it looks like nothing happens.

Try:

cursor agent --print --trust --yolo "Read program.md and let's kick off a new experiment! Let's do the setup first."

Key flags:

  • --print / -p: headless mode + prints output

  • --trust: skips workspace trust prompts (works with --print)

  • --yolo / --force: runs commands without confirmation (important if the agent needs to execute things like uv run train.py)

If you’re running this on a VM and want it to keep going after disconnecting SSH, use tmux:

tmux new -s research
cursor agent --print --trust --yolo "Read program.md and let's kick off a new experiment! Let's do the setup first."
# detach: Ctrl+B, D
# later: tmux attach -t research

Best,
Mohit