Make agent status spinner informative: last tool, elapsed time

Ideas Feature Requests
1

Feature request for product/service

Cursor IDE

Describe the request

Cursor version: 2.7.0-pre.140.patch.0
OS: Windows 10 build 26220

The problem

When Cursor’s agent is between tool-call rounds, I see one of two messages:

  • “Planning next moves” — generic; shown while the model generates its next response
  • “Taking longer than expected” — generic; shown after ~30–60 s of no output

Neither tells me:

  • Which tool just finished (or which is about to run)
  • How long this particular wait has been
  • Whether a subagent is active
  • Whether something is stuck vs. legitimately processing a large context

For simple 10-second tasks this doesn’t matter. For complex tasks (reviewing 20+ rulefiles, running subagent chains, executing shell builds), these messages leave me with no
signal for 2–5 minutes at a time.

What I’d like

Any combination of these would help enormously:

  1. Show last tool name: "Planning next moves — last: Read backlog.md"
  2. Show elapsed seconds: "Planning next moves (23 s)" or "Taking longer than expected (68 s) — cancel?"
  3. Agent-annotatable status: let rules/agents write a status string (e.g. a special comment or think-aloud marker) that Cursor surfaces in the spinner
  4. Settings to opt in/out of each of the above

Current workaround (partial)

I added a convention to my agent rules: agents must write a one-sentence status in chat
at the start of each turn before tool calls. This helps — but it fires before tools
run, not during them, and doesn’t address “Taking longer than expected” at all.

Related

  • Agent idle timeout FR (see [cursor issue-05] if I post it): that handles the “definitely hung” case; this request handles “how long / what is it doing?”

Happy to test a build.

Related forum posts

Make agent chat tab visually obvious when waiting for Run / approval