Failed to start VM daemon

Bug Reports
1

Describe the Bug

I get the following error frequently when attempting to use background agents, specifically from within the Cursor app for Mac.

It happens with claude sonnet, opus, and o3.

Background agents appear to work when initiated from the browser, but not from within the app.

Allocating resources for this agent (request id: bc-95f24111-23ce-4614-bf94-0fa034f5ea1a)…
[Status] Startup completed
[Status] Starting Cursor…
Failed to start VM daemon

Steps to Reproduce

Not sure, I get this about 75% of the time I use background agents from within the Cursor Mac app.

Expected Behavior

The background agent should start.

Operating System

MacOS

Current Cursor Version (Menu → About Cursor → Copy)

Version: 1.2.4
VSCode Version: 1.99.3
Commit: a8e95743c5268be73767c46944a71f4465d05c90
Date: 2025-07-10T16:53:59.659Z
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

No - Cursor works, but with this issue

2

Update:
I was able to start an agent from the web dashboard (https://cursor.com/agents). This is not ideal as I cannot specify the context files though.

The same issue started happening for me about 2 hours ago. It seems to be an issue with a specific repo as I was able to start a worker in another repo.

Operating System

MacOS

Current Cursor Version (Menu → About Cursor → Copy)

Version: 1.2.4 (Universal)
VSCode Version: 1.99.3
Commit: a8e95743c5268be73767c46944a71f4465d05c90
Date: 2025-07-10T16:55:16.443Z (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 23.5.0

Does this stop you from using Cursor

Yes - I am unable to use background agents. Local IDE works fine.

3

I was able to fix this issue for my environment. It was due to a bad snapshot. Here are the steps to fix.

  1. Open Cursor settings (Cursor → Settings → Cursor Settings)
  2. Click “Background Agents”
  3. Under Configuration click “Base Environment”
  4. Click “Re-Configure Manual Snapshot”
  5. Follow the steps to create a new snapshot
4

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