I spotted a message, ‘Status update’ in my agent window a couple of times today. It took some time to decipher this, and realize that it was indicative of a model switch made automatically by the agent.
In both cases, this was due to my selected model exceeding the on-demand budget I’d set, which caused an automatic reversion to the Cursor Models bucket.
I think this could be much better explained – explain what happened, which model was in use, and which one it had been switched to. Or better yet, treat this event as a phase change like going from Agent to Plan mode, and pop up a blocking modal dialog to gain consent and awareness before continuing.
Hey @rsb, thanks for flagging this, and sorry it took detective work to decode!
That “Status update” line is supposed to read as a full sentence, something like “Switched to after reaching your Other Models usage limit.” The text is being sent, but the chat is currently showing only the label instead of the message, so you were right that it marks the moment your selected model hit your on-demand spend limit and the chat continued on a Cursor model. The team has this on their list to fix so the row says what actually happened.
Would you mind sharing a screenshot if you see this happen again?
I certainly will, although I think you’ll find the screenshot rather unsatisfying; the message just said “Status update” (in the same style as a message such as “Explored…” or “Thought briefly”.
The particular transition was from Claude Opus 5 to Grok 4.6 High Fast (my environment: Version: 3.18.9
VS Code Extension API: 1.128.0
Commit: 2ba48ff3f7514cc4643c52ca9f7b3173d9b66130
Date: 2026-08-27T01:42:22.092Z
Layout: IDE
Build Type: Stable
Release Track: Default
Electron: 40.10.3
Chromium: 144.0.7559.236
Node.js: 24.15.0
V8: 14.4.258.32-electron.0
xterm.js: 6.1.0-beta.291
OS: Linux x64 6.8.0-138-generic )