Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?
Cursor IDE
Describe the Bug
I have observed THREE distinct symptoms, all surfacing as the same
“Starting up” card. Please treat each as a separate sub-bug under
the same root cause if needed.
Mode A - “Stuck Starting up, no actual work happens”:
Card stays on “Starting up” forever. No backend activity. Eventually
auto-cancelled at ~256 sec with the misleading “interrupted by the
user” message. Filesystem evidence: no new entries in
agent-transcripts/, terminals/, or any target file the prompt
was supposed to write.
Mode B - “Stuck Starting up, but the sub-agent IS doing real work”:
Card stays on “Starting up” indefinitely, BUT the sub-agent is
actually running successfully in the background. Filesystem
evidence shows real activity: new agent-transcripts// files
appear, new terminals/ entries are created, target files are
edited, and progress continues for many minutes. The UI never
transitions the card out of “Starting up” - so the user has no
visibility into progress, no token / cost stream, no live tool
call list, and no way to pause or interrupt cleanly. This is
arguably the worst variant: it silently succeeds without any way
for the user to confirm.
Mode C - “Card just hangs”:
Variant of A or B where the card never reaches a terminal state
at all (no failure, no completion). User has to manually dismiss
it and trust nothing was lost.
Steps to Reproduce
It is occuring in all long running workflows.
Expected Behavior
I should be able to see the progress of sub agents, also interact with their terminal commands or any actions which required approval.
Operating System
MacOS
Version Information
Version: 3.1.17 (Universal)
VSCode Version: 1.105.1
Commit: fce1e9ab7844f9ea35793da01e634aa7e50bce90
Date: 2026-04-19T19:33:58.189Z
Layout: editor
Build Type: Stable
Release Track: Default
Electron: 39.8.1
Chromium: 142.0.7444.265
Node.js: 22.22.1
V8: 14.2.231.22-electron.0
OS: Darwin arm64 25.4.0
For AI issues: which model did you use?
OPUS : 4.7
Does this stop you from using Cursor
Yes - Cursor is unusable