"brake" toggle to prevent agent from making changes

Feature Requests
1

I love the cursor agent. It is great at doing research. It is good at making changes. Sometimes changes need lots of research before we settle on a design.

I’d love to be able to toggle do not change anything, sort of like a brake lever I could toggle. Currently about 1 in 10 of my prompts start with DO NOT CHANGE ANY CODE.

1 Like
2

Hey, you have an Ask mode for this. Use it if you just need to chat with the model and switch to the Agent when you’re ready to edit code.

4

No, Ask mode is hobbled by an ineffective grep tool. I am still only able to use Agent mode to grep through files in the codebase, log files, generated code etc. I am still forced to add a “Do not change any code” every few prompts.

What I’m looking for is a toggle that tells the agent not to change anything, but still allows the agent to use the console and use full grep capabilities, and other reading tools like sed, awk, tr, sort, uniq, ls, tree, find.

EDIT here are some examples of Agent mode deftly reading a large log file:

grep -n "Input JSON graph\|Output JSON graph" ./tmp/cube.log
sed -n '865850,865870p' ./tmp/cube.log
sed -n '865855,1000000p' ./tmp/cube.log | sed -n '1,100000p' | grep -A 10 -B 5 '"torch.ops.aten.add"'
sed -n '865855,870000p' ./tmp/cube.log | grep -n "aten.add.Tensor\|aten.mul.Tensor" | head -10
sed -n '865855,870000p' ./tmp/cube.log | grep '"target":' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr
sed -n '1435058,1440000p' ./tmp/cube.log | grep '"target":' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -20
sed -n '1435058,1500000p' ./tmp/cube.log | grep -A 15 -B 5 '"torch.ops.aten.add.Tensor"' | head -40
sed -n '1435058,1500000p' ./tmp/cube.log | grep -A 15 -B 5 '"torch.ops.aten.mul.Tensor"' | head -40
sed -n '1435058,1500000p' ./tmp/cube.log | grep -A 10 -B 5 '"torch.ops.aten.sigmoid.default"'

I wish Ask mode were this magical.