By the way, our company has already banned annual subscriptions for Cursor, opting instead for monthly plans combined with other tools.
1 Like
This is very upsetting. I have custom modes that were deeply integrated into my workflows, and all of a sudden you guys pull the rug out? Thatās ridiculous. Please reconsider.. I have been a Cursor user for a long time and this is extremely frustrating
4 Likes
This doesnāt suffice - I typically maintain multiple cursor tabs with different personas, and I canāt get into the same rhythm this way. Please bring back custom modes!!
2 Likes
Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?
Cursor IDE
Describe the Bug
My custom Agents disappeared after Iāve updated Cursor today (Early Access). I couldnāt find the early access change logs too.
Steps to Reproduce
- Open Agent dropddown
- Then you see Agent, Plan, and Chat. List of created agents disappeared and the Custom item too.
Expected Behavior
Show my custom Agents
Operating System
MacOS
Current Cursor Version (Menu ā About Cursor ā Copy)
Version: 2.1.7 (Universal)
VSCode Version: 1.105.1
Commit: 3d2e45538bcc4fd7ed28cc113c2110b26a824a00
Date: 2025-11-20T18:51:07.967Z (2 hrs ago)
Electron: 37.7.0
Chromium: 138.0.7204.251
Node.js: 22.20.0
V8: 13.8.258.32-electron.0
OS: Darwin arm64 25.0.0
Does this stop you from using Cursor
Yes - Cursor is unusable
1 Like
Functionally commands and agents was two absolutely different thing. This is ridiculous that the dev team decides to make that impactful decisions without even asking the users. Why do I need get informed trough the forum trough other peopleās post about these impactful changes? This is absolutely the worst business practice, as custom agents was your selling point couple of months agoā¦. And in the meantime, the quality of the updates isā¦ just to be honest not so good.
10 Likes
What is the real reason for removing or deprecating custom modes? I still want the ability to define agents as personas.
@condor
Can you explain the strategy around commands and the experience? Youāre asking us how we use it and youāre talking about commands that have very different meanings and ways of interacting compared to the custom agents. So, as a User Iāll command an Agent which is called via a ācommandā? A Custom Mode? I want my custom mode to run commands automatically, not I run commands manually. Have you done any research with your users about that experience, or is it just a guess or a strong assumption that custom modes are not useful where they are in terms of experience? Or is the cursor team planning to do a better feature that will replace custom mode, like finally using the Agents.md properly, which is not with Background Agents only.
**Iām a paying enterprise customer.
This is a fundamentally different thing compared to custom modes. I think the main feature of custom mode is that you can restrict which tools you want agent to use. This is especially important when you have a lot of MCPs, so you donāt want to bloat your whole context with MCPs. Like, anthropic released a blog about skills as their way to combat MCP context bloat, and you do what, remove the way we can do at least something similar to that in cursor? I donāt need commands to control system prompt, I can do that with agents.md and similar custom files and just tag them into context, but I canāt control tool access via either commands or context controlā¦
8 Likes
I use a custom mode with zero tool calls available, because I want a way to prevent all tool calls. Iām on an older version of Cursor and have done some hacky stuff to re-enable āApply to fileā for custom modes. I still lament the missing Cmd-Enter to manually run a codebase search.
After codebase search was taken out of custom modes, I moved that part of my workflow over to codex. After manual āapply to fileā was taken out for custom modes, Iām using an old version of Cursor and hacked it back in.
After custom modes are gone, thereās nothing left for me. Obviously your business decisions are your business, I expect you know which kind of customer youāre chasing and Iām not them. Just giving my input.
1 Like
How much time has elapsed since Cursor launched custom modes? I donāt understand the urge to break all the flows that they have ever created. Now Iām switching to commands, which is not an exact replacement (it is what it is), waiting until the team also breaks those. Unbelievable.
1 Like
I too am incredibly disappointed by the removal of custom modes. Commands are a totally part of the workflow. I used a flow similiar to cursor-memory-bank that was extremely effective and now its completely gone? Horrible user experienceā¦. and, as you can see the author of the original cursor-memory-bank has move onto Claude Codeā¦. I didnāt want to affiliate with any model vendors so that I could get the best of developer tools and models, but now am reconsidering that decision. So sadā¦
4 Likes
You can use any model in Claude Code if that makes it better, custom model support in CC is sort of better than in cursor. Search CCR as an example for how to do that.
But thatās out of topic, really wish theyād revert the deletion of custom mode support. I have a feeling that theyāre sunsetting it since itās annoying to maintain, based on intercept of payload, cursor syncs modes and chat state on their side, so they have to save that all inside their infra, and populate agent with custom modes before the chat hits the agent (instead of just sending array of enabled tools on each chat request and saving modes on client side with simpler sync just for cloud sync), but still itās a feature which sort of means death of MCPs in cursor for me.
As someone that has gone deep on Cursor (like $6-10K per month deep) I find this to be pretty frustrating. I like Cursor, I like it a lot but to do what I need to do I have had to build tools, to build the tools that I want to develop using Cursor. I have not used a bunch of other IDEs but when Modes became available it was perfect timing as I was in the middle of developing yet another tool after being constantly frustrated by how much sunshine was getting blown up my a@% by the Agents. When I finished I ended up having built an entire multi-layer, ZERO TRUST framework around them so that they couldnāt lie any further, and you guessed it, Modes were a big part of the TDD stages and verification (i.e., canāt move past initial Design without all the hashes showing that the Agent didnāt just bulls@#% me about checks they were supposed to have run before gettin all code happy). I had been hoping that we would see an enhancement to Modes so I was blown away when all of my TDD Modes got blown-away with the updateā¦I just finished off building a whole CAMEL back-end so that I could use Agent Mesh and Swarms which meant that yāallās Agent was just passing notes and keeping scoreā¦now I have very little incentive to keep using Cursor as an IDE as I have only been sticking with it since I have gotten super familiar with how it works and like the interface. I agree with others, I have tons of Commands and it isnāt the same thingā¦please consider bring back Modes and enhancing them - this just feels like you went backwards.
4 Likes
This is really cool. Thanks for sharing - I had started to build almost this exact thing before I decided I didnāt want to go Full-Claude.
Thatās non sense.
Cursor is falling apart removing its best features since the 2.0 version .
Commands are not a replace for custom agents. The agents were too useful to create personas, with different mcp and tools permissions, etc. Also it was easy to use because of the keyboard shortcut.
What a shame..
Bad decisions. You should consult the users more
2 Likes
Why you all remove this feature ? this is the one strong feature of Cursor.
If so, please remove everything if you think that make the cursor better.
1 Like
Please revert this change.
1 Like
Please return Custom Modes.
3 Likes
Custom Modes are more than useful and convenient and efficient than just commands and prompts, so removing Custom Modes degrades the workflow so much more than it may seem, as small as this feature looks, it did so make good impact for us users. I hope the team reconsiders and brings it back as it has so much value and use beside how small it may seem, it is one of the most useful features ever made
2 Likes
I wrote courses on how to build developers to work efficiently using custom modes. Now I should tell all my students not to use Cursor, if they want to build a workflow. Cursor is just a nice toy for beginners now - wrong development line
6 Likes
Before the release of 2.1, custom mode used to be present, now its gone, why? Will it be brought back? I hope so, cuz its one of the most useful features beside how small it may seem
4 Likes