Nested and async subagents don't work

Support Bug Reports
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1

Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

Cursor IDE

Describe the Bug

No matter what I write and no matter how I config the agents .md I can’t get any of these two new features to work.

I have seen other people get it work, but I am not able

Steps to Reproduce

“Call 4 async subagents that call other 4 and ask their favourite colors.”

Works for some people, not for me.

Operating System

MacOS

Version Information

Version: 2.5.17 (Universal)
VSCode Version: 1.105.1
Commit: 7b98dcb824ea96c9c62362a5e80dbf0d1aae4770
Date: 2026-02-17T05:58:33.110Z (3 days ago)
Build Type: Stable
Release Track: Default
Electron: 39.3.0
Chromium: 142.0.7444.265
Node.js: 22.21.1
V8: 14.2.231.22-electron.0
OS: Darwin arm64 22.6.0

For AI issues: which model did you use?

Tried a couple, no change

Does this stop you from using Cursor

No - Cursor works, but with this issue

4

Have you ever seen anyone succeed? I’ve installed it several times and tested it repeatedly without success. Even when I let the cursor troubleshoot itself, it said that subagents could not call subagents.

5

By the way, I’m using the Windows version of the IDE.

6

@jojolionss could you post a separate thread for IDE? this is a CLI thread.

7

hi @Havard_Njastad and welcome to Cursor Forum.

Yes, the Cursor CLI supports running agents asynchronously (in the background) and starting nested agents.

1. Explore Subagent (for codebase exploration):

"What is the codebase structure?"
"How do API endpoints work in this codebase?"
"Find all React components in src/components/"

2. Shell Subagent (for terminal tasks):

"Run the tests for this project"
"Check the git status and recent commits"
"Execute npm install and build the project"

3. Debug Subagent (for bug investigation):

"Investigate why this endpoint returns 500 errors"
"Debug the race condition in the auth flow"

4. Browser Subagent (for manual GUI testing):

"Test the login flow in the browser"
"Verify the UI changes look correct"

Triggering Nested Subagents (Swarm Pattern)

Example prompts that trigger the swarm/nested pattern:

"Swarm this task across multiple workers"
"Use a coordinator to parallelize this refactoring"
"Launch a swarm to implement these features in parallel"
9

I think this is related to the IDE, this came from the discord Server where he provided some screenshots:

image
image696×576 26 KB

The same exact prompt using Auto model worked perfectly to me.

10

The exact same problem in an IDE, subagents cannot launch nested subagents (2.5.20, windows) and neither they can run async. The main agent says “I will run X agents in parallel”, it runs one, wait for finish and runs another. I do not understand because this worked in 2.4.x

11

Fixed in the 2.5.20 update