Hi all, thank you for sharing your feedback here. I do hear you. For a lot of you, the layout that mattered was files on the left and all of your AI tools as tabs on the right, so you could switch without eating editor space or covering Explorer. That workflow really did work for a while, and it was not anything you misconfigured.
That window of time you noticed this behavior was unintentional. The right-hand Agents panel is reserved for Cursor’s own agent tabs. For about a month, a change on our side opened that surface again when it wasn’t meant to be, and 3.15.6 brings it back in line.
I know the alternatives are not the same. Nesting Codex or Claude Code under Explorer fights the file tree. Opening them as editor splits uses space you would rather keep for code. You are not wrong that one shared tab strip felt cleaner.
To be straight with you rather than leave you guessing: this part of the layout is staying, and there is no setting that restores docking in the Agents panel. Third-party agent extensions still work from the left Activity Bar and as regular editor tabs. If a view landed nested under Explorer, drag its section header onto the Activity Bar so it gets its own top-level icon.