Cursor agent hangs

Support Bug Reports
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1

Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

Cursor IDE

Describe the Bug

Running cursor agent hangs forever. Launching the IDE and interacting with the agent works.
Is there a way to debug the agent?

Steps to Reproduce

In a terminal, type cursor agent and wait

Expected Behavior

Cursor responds within a few seconds

Screenshots / Screen Recordings

Operating System

MacOS

Version Information

Version: 2.6.20
VSCode Version: 1.105.1
Commit: b29eb4ee5f9f6d1cb2afbc09070198d3ea6ad760
Date: 2026-03-17T01:50:02.404Z
Build Type: Stable
Release Track: Default
Electron: 39.8.1
Chromium: 142.0.7444.265
Node.js: 22.22.1
V8: 14.2.231.22-electron.0
OS: Darwin arm64 25.3.0

Does this stop you from using Cursor

Yes - Cursor is unusable

4

Hey, thanks for the report. This is a known issue with the CLI agent, and the team is aware of it and tracking it.

A couple things to try:

  1. Temporarily disable MCP servers

The CLI agent loads the MCP config from the same files as the IDE, and a stuck MCP server can block startup completely. Try renaming the config to rule this out:

mv ~/.cursor/mcp.json ~/.cursor/mcp.json.bak

If you also have a project .cursor/mcp.json, rename that too. Then run agent again.

  1. Share your cursor-agent version
agent --version

If it works without MCP, that helps narrow it down. If it still hangs, we can dig in further.

Also, there’s a known interaction between iTerm2 and the CLI on macOS Apple Silicon. If disabling MCP doesn’t help, try running agent from the standard Terminal.app and see if anything changes.

Let me know how it goes.

5

Hi! Thanks for the response.

I do not have any MCP setup

❯ ls -la ~/.cursor
total 600
drwxr-xr-x@ 13 rahulsomasunderam  staff     416 Mar 22 09:33 .
drwxr-x---+ 92 rahulsomasunderam  staff    2944 Mar 22 09:34 ..
-rw-r--r--   1 rahulsomasunderam  staff     922 Mar 22 09:33 .gitignore
-rw-r--r--@  1 rahulsomasunderam  staff      53 Mar 20 08:34 agent-cli-state.json
drwxr-xr-x   3 rahulsomasunderam  staff      96 Mar 20 20:49 ai-tracking
-rw-r--r--   1 rahulsomasunderam  staff     798 Mar 19 20:40 argv.json
-rw-r--r--@  1 rahulsomasunderam  staff     390 Mar 19 20:43 cli-config.json
drwxr-xr-x   3 rahulsomasunderam  staff      96 Mar 19 20:40 extensions
-rw-r--r--   1 rahulsomasunderam  staff     261 Mar 19 20:50 ide_state.json
drwxr-xr-x   3 rahulsomasunderam  staff      96 Mar 19 20:43 plugins
drwxr-xr-x   6 rahulsomasunderam  staff     192 Mar 20 08:34 projects
drwxr-xr-x   9 rahulsomasunderam  staff     288 Mar 19 20:43 skills-cursor
-rw-r--r--@  1 rahulsomasunderam  staff  284176 Mar 22 09:33 statsig-cache.json

Same for the local

❯ ls -la .cursor
ls: .cursor: No such file or directory

cursor agent –version also hangs.

But agent works. Thanks!

6

Glad the agent is working as a workaround.

The difference is that cursor agent goes through the shell-shim IDE, which seems to hang at some point during initialization, while agent calls the CLI binary directly.

For now, use agent directly - it works the same way functionally. If anything changes or you need more help, just let me know.