Cursor 2.5: Async Subagents

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New in Cursor! · Full changelog · Main announcement

Subagents just got a big upgrade. Previously, all subagents ran synchronously (the parent agent had to wait for each one to finish before moving on). Now subagents can run asynchronously, so the parent keeps working while subagents handle tasks in the background.

Subagents can also spawn their own subagents, creating a tree of coordinated work. This opens up bigger tasks like multi-file features, large refactors, and complex debugging where research and fixes can happen in parallel.

We’ve also improved subagent performance since 2.4, with lower latency, better streaming feedback, and more responsive parallel execution.

We’d love your feedback!

  • How are async subagents handling your larger, more complex tasks compared to before?
  • Have you noticed the performance improvements in subagent latency and streaming?
  • What kinds of tasks would benefit most from deeper subagent trees?

If you’ve found a bug, please post it in Bug Reports instead, so we can track and address it properly, but also feel free to drop a link to it in this thread for visibility.

3 Likes
Cursor 2.5: Plugins, Sandbox Access Controls, and Async Subagents
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I must have missed something, I’m using Cursor 2.5.17 and I still can’t get a subagent to run in the background, or have the coordinator/subagent pattern working. Do you have any tips to get this going?

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I made this to help get started:

I find it much more repeatable to tag every agent in the starting prompt and say “Orchestrate among these subagents to complete the plan/task/etc.”

Recently, I’ve seen significant improvement in the rules helping with subagent orchestration. Because of that, I’ve put together this orchestration rule that gives all the context the agent needs to start orchestrating subagents.

You don’t have to use this, I just opened it up to make it helpful to others. But you can also copy this repository as a template by instructing your agent in Cursor:

Copy the subagent/rule setup in this repo https://github.com/tmcfarlane/oh-my-cursor but set it up like.... <insert any preference>

That’s what open-source means right? Copy/pasta? :winking_face_with_tongue:

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See how it even uses a subagent to read the rule? Cursor has gone FULL SWARM :smiley:

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is this update related to the is_background flag in subagent definition or is this a separate thing?

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Hi! How do enable a subagent to run asynchronously and to spawn new subagents? Updated cursor but this does not work out of the box

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It would be really handy if we could use subagents with composer 1.5, it’s my go to model and it can’t even spawn subagents, only models charged on API can, I’d rather pay API costs on composer 1.5 and have access to the features I’m paying for.

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I made this to help get started:

I find it much more repeatable to tag every agent in the starting prompt and say “Orchestrate among these subagents to complete the plan/task/etc.”

Recently, I’ve seen significant improvement in the rules helping with subagent orchestration. Because of that, I’ve put together [this orchestration rule](oh-my-cursor/rules/orchestrator.mdc at main · tmcfarlane/oh-my-cursor · GitHub) that gives all the context the agent needs to start orchestrating subagents.

Still, results vary. I still prefer to tag all the agents in the prompt and tell it to orchestrate.