Background command format and behavior is changing without notice

Support Bug Reports
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1

Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

Cursor IDE

Describe the Bug

n the last few days, we have run into major instability when the agent executes commands.

Foreground commands now seem to time out after 10 minutes, so we were forced to switch to background commands. However, 24 hours later, the foreground commands stopped timing out, and the background terminal output format changed (which broke a system we developed to ensure the agent continues once a long-running command finishes).

Then, 48 hours later, the foreground commands started timing out again at 10 minutes.

What is happening?

Below is the current background agent terminal format (when the foreground command times out at 10 minutes).

Please, can you just allow us to run foreground commands for more than 10 minutes? This is extremely frustrating.

Steps to Reproduce

Try running commands for more than 10 minutes; the behavior has changed multiple times over the last four days.

Expected Behavior

Commands running longer than 10 minutes should not be cancelled, and the background terminal output format should not change without notice.

Operating System

Linux

Current Cursor Version (Menu → About Cursor → Copy)

Version: 2.3.41
VSCode Version: 1.105.1
Commit: 2ca326e0d1ce10956aea33d54c0e2d8c13c58a30
Date: 2026-01-16T19:14:00.150Z
Electron: 37.7.0
Chromium: 138.0.7204.251
Node.js: 22.20.0
V8: 13.8.258.32-electron.0
OS: Darwin arm64 25.2.0

Does this stop you from using Cursor

Yes - Cursor is unusable

3

The format of terminal when foreground command timeout in 10min is this one

=== Background Shell 433405 ===
Command: xxxxx
Working Directory: xxxxxxxx
Started: 2026-01-18T14:11:31.545Z

============================================================

SOME LOGS

SOME LOGS

SOME LOGS
============================================================
Exited with code: 0
Ended: 2026-01-18T14:18:52.157Z

And we ask our agent to run many times this command even if the command timeout, to continue once the background command is finished

while ! tail -n 2 /xxxx/.cursor/projects/xxxx/terminals/660868.txt | grep -q ‘^Exited with code:’; do sleep 1; done

But between friday and saturday the format changed and “Exited with code: 0” at the end of the file was never printed, due to the format change

4

Thanks for the report, I’ve raised it with the team.

Can you please share Request IDs if possible? Would help the team with investigation.

6

Hi @sanjeed5 sorry i don’t have anymore the request id, do you have some testing/feature flag release system currently running on this feature, explaining the erratic behavior ?

7

hi @sanjeed5

In last cursor update the background shell changed again, what is happening ?

In less than 2 week you changed the background shell formatting 3 times.

Here the last version format


---

pid: 96151

cwd: "xxxxxxxxxx"

command: "cd xxxxxx && yarn test:ci"

started_at: 2026-01-23T23:59:47.984Z

running_for_seconds: 15    

---

SOME LOGS

---

exit_code: 0

elapsed_ms: 498689

ended_at: 2026-01-23T23:57:10.754Z

---