Cursor Agents not being triggered

Bug Reports
1

Describe the Bug

Cursor Background Agents have been working great, but suddenly started to error out today when I launch one from Slack. I’ve tried removing & reinstalling our Cursor app in GitHub.

Getting these error details:

Background Agent failed to start. You can try again, or send feedback to the Cursor team if the issue persists.

{
“startError”: {
“error”: “ERROR_BAD_REQUEST”,
“details”: {
“title”: “Bad request.”,
“detail”: “Snapshot is repo-read-write but no installation id is provided or can be found.”,
“isRetryable”: false
},
“isExpected”: true
}
}

appears to be an issue with “no installation id is provided or can be found”.

Steps to Reproduce

  1. Trigger @Cursor background agent from any source

Expected Behavior

Successfully trigger a Cursor agent

Operating System

MacOS

Current Cursor Version (Menu → About Cursor → Copy)

Version: 1.1.7
VSCode Version: 1.96.2
Commit: 7111807980fa9c93aedd455ffa44b682c0dc1350
Date: 2025-07-01T07:26:02.358Z (2 days ago)
Electron: 34.5.1
Chromium: 132.0.6834.210
Node.js: 20.19.0
V8: 13.2.152.41-electron.0
OS: Darwin arm64 24.5.0

Does this stop you from using Cursor

Yes - Cursor is unusable

2

Hi @michael-walker and welcome to Cursor Forum

Thank you for the bug report.

Do you have a configured snapshot ID in your environment.json?

  • If yes, can you go to Cursor Settings > Background Agents and start from there the background agent environment to verify it runs?
3

Hi @T1000, thanks for the response.

I just dug into the environment.json settings, and it appears that it was failing to run now. Not sure what might have changed - it was all working previously.

Just set up a new environment snapshot and now the snapshot is loading manually.

However, I just tried booting up a background agent again, and I’m still getting the same error:

Allocating resources for this agent (request id: bc-2499ee0b-c2fd-421a-a14f-33cf394621a9)...

Error: Bad request.
Details:
Snapshot is repo-read-write but no installation id is provided or can be found.
4

@michael-walker thank you thats great, now the request is shown. Cursor Team is on it

5

Agents aren’t working right for me today either:

requestID - bc-e941cfc5-90c6-46c5-86bc-eb321f6d55b5

warning: failed to remove bin/act: Permission denied

[Exit] Failed (code: 1)
Error: Environment failed to start
Details:
Failed t
Failed to execute install command configure-git (system: true): Command failed with exit code 1: stderr: warning: failed to remove bin/act: Permission denied

6

@mrjasonroy thanks for the details will bump it up.

7

update - it appears that agents are working now after the snapshot update. thanks for the help!

(the issue is that I was running the agents on our main branch, which didn’t have the new environment.json file loaded up yet)

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