Background agents fail to start

Bug Reports
1

Describe the Bug

Background agents were working great for a week, but are now broken for all engineers in our org. The following happens whenever I try to start up a background agent.

Allocating resources for this agent (request id: …)…

Error: Environment failed to start
Details:
Failed to create container from image: Docker responded with status code 500: unable to find user developer: no matching entries in passwd file

Steps to Reproduce

Start a background agent

Expected Behavior

background agent works

Operating System

MacOS

Current Cursor Version (Menu → About Cursor → Copy)

Version: 1.1.3
VSCode Version: 1.96.2
Commit: 979ba33804ac150108481c14e0b5cb970bda3260
Date: 2025-06-15T06:35:49.230Z
Electron: 34.5.1
Chromium: 132.0.6834.210
Node.js: 20.19.0
V8: 13.2.152.41-electron.0
OS: Darwin arm64 24.5.0

Does this stop you from using Cursor

Sometimes - I can sometimes use Cursor

1 Like
2

This just started happening to me too.

My repo went from sometimes failing to spawn background agents to always failing to spawn background agents.

I’ve upgraded to latest docker and it doesn’t fix it.

Can the dev team increase the logging in this module? We are flying blind here to fix the issue and there’s no logs.

3

@zackees I figured out what happened with mine. I followed the instructions and added an environment.json file, which was the source of the problem. When I deleted the environment.json file I had created, the problem resolved itself.

4

Instructions where?

6

I went ahead a just created a new branch with none of the history.

The exact same thing happens, even with a small git repo with < 1000 files in it.

This is really a bummer, curser ai is completely broken now for me. It might be something else but I can’t figure out what it can be because I don’t have access to logging.

Impliment json_console dump(fl::sstream& out);

Starting up background agent…

Allocating resources for this agent (request id: bc-cc695073-c171-4031-8ed4-7c9557739c58)...
[Status] Checking out repository…
Error: Environment failed to start
Details:
Error waiting for container: Docker container wait error

Can someone at curser ai please look into this?

Update:

I was able to work around the issue. Keep in mind my git history is dirty with a lot of artifacts due to documentation being generated on each release.

Creating a branch with zero history did not solve the issue. I had to create a whole copy of the git repo with the master branch truncated to the just the most recent release. Only then with a clean repo was the background agent able to start. I think this is a bug where the timeout is too low, progress is not correctly checked from the git-action, and in-efficient git clone/pull/fetch operations are being used.

This is sort of a blessing in disguise because the git history was getting quite large so i needed to clean it up anyway. But this should not prevent Curser AI from working. I’m sure there are a lot of repos that have extensive history in it and right now this bug puts an upper limit of the repo’s that Curser ai is able to access. I’d imagine most enterprise users are going to hit this bug. I’m operating an artificially large (.git history) as a medium sized open source repo: FastLED.

Edit: If you are affected by this bug then please speak up so we get the staffs attention to this major bug.

7

Hi, I am also facing the same issue. Same environment.json working before. So I believe that’s not the case in my scenario but its broken, tried multiple things.

8

Experiencing the same issue here.

9

I have the same issue.
It would be great if this could be addressed ASAP.