Hi Cursor. Should Cursor cloud agents be able to access and read GitHub issues?
I’ve reinstalled the Cursor GitHub app multiple times, and observed that it claims to be granting read/write access to issues as shown here:
Cursor
Installed 52 minutes ago Developed by cursor https://cursor.com
Connect Cursor to GitHub to allow agents to do work for you in the background.
Permissions
Read access to actions, commit statuses, deployments, members, metadata, packages, and pages
Read and write access to checks, code, discussions, issues, pull requests, and workflows
My Cursor cloud agents keep telling me something like this:
I’m not currently able to read GitHub issues for this repo.
Testing
pwd && git remote -v && gh issue list --limit 5 — GitHub returned GraphQL: Resource not accessible by integration (repository.issues), so the current token lacks issues read permission.
Yes, cloud agents should be able to access GitHub issues, but there’s a known gap right now. The GitHub App requests broad permissions at the app level (which is what you see in the installation settings), but the token the agent actually uses in its sandbox is scoped more narrowly and currently doesn’t include issues access. That’s why you see the “Resource not accessible by integration” error.
Two workarounds while this is being addressed:
-
Paste issue content directly into the agent prompt — copy the title, description, and key comments rather than asking it to fetch by number.
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Create a Personal Access Token at https://github.com/settings/personal-access-tokens with the needed scopes, and add it as an environment variable GH_TOKEN=ghp_... in your cloud environment settings. The gh CLI will use that token instead of the built-in one. Another user confirmed this works.
Let me know if either of those helps!