Cursor Agent - Auto Mode interminably slow

[Peter_Cox]

Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

Cursor CLI

Describe the Bug

I’m using auto mode in cursor agent. Its extremely slow - I gave it a simple task to take simple entities and summarise for me in markdown what the properties are in a markdown format.

As an aside can we at least have a “Paste screenshot” button here when creating a bug, or even a bug report in Cursor. The “Create new topic” modal sucks so much, it takes ages to fill out - we discover bugs when we’re busy coding and ive given up several times because of how long it takes to file a bug.

Its excruciatingly slow and just takes ages to grep/read files etc. I used to be able to hand off basic frontend tasks to it but over the last couple of days its dialup speed worthy,.

Steps to Reproduce

whenever I use agent.

Expected Behavior

it should be faster!

Screenshots / Screen Recordings

Operating System

MacOS

Current Cursor Version (Menu → About Cursor → Copy)

Version: 2.2.20
VSCode Version: 1.105.1
Commit: b3573281c4775bfc6bba466bf6563d3d498d1070
Date: 2025-12-12T06:29:26.017Z
Electron: 37.7.0
Chromium: 138.0.7204.251
Node.js: 22.20.0
V8: 13.8.258.32-electron.0
OS: Darwin arm64 25.1.0

For AI issues: which model did you use?

Auto

Does this stop you from using Cursor

Sometimes - I can sometimes use Cursor

[deanrie]

Hey, thanks for the report. The issue with slow cursor-agent performance in auto mode during grep and file reading is a known problem.

For now, try this:

• Use the /compress command if the chat is growing - it speeds up grep searches noticeably.
• Break large grep requests into several specific searches - one big request can make the agent use 100% CPU.
• Exclude large directories from indexing (.gitignore or settings in .cursor/cli-config.json) - node_modules, dist, build slow down grep.

The team is working on optimizing grep search and CLI agent performance.

[Peter_Cox]

thanks for the helpful advice, ill take a look.