Subagent Delegation Not Working from Parent Directory

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1

I have run in to something and i’m not sure if its intended behavior or i am simply that dense :smiley:

Subagent Delegation Not Working from Parent Directory

Environment

• Cursor Version: 2.4.21 (arm64)
• OS: macOS (Darwin 25.2.0)
• Subagent Location: ~/MyCompany/project/.cursor/agents/
• Subagents Defined: developer.md, reviewer.md

Issue Description

I’ve configured two subagents in my project at ~/MyCompany/project/.cursor/agents/ (a developer agent and a reviewer agent). I’m experiencing inconsistent behavior with
subagent delegation depending on where I launch Cursor IDE:
:white_check_mark: Works: When I open Cursor IDE directly in ~/MyCompany/project/ and ask the agent to delegate to subagents, delegation works correctly.
:cross_mark: Doesn’t Work: When I open Cursor IDE in the parent directory ~/MyCompany/ and ask the agent to delegate to subagents, I get generic responses like “I don’t have the
tools to delegate” instead of proper delegation.
:cross_mark: Also Doesn’t Work: Cursor CLI doesn’t seem to delegate to subagents even when launched from within ~/MyCompany/project/.

Steps to Reproduce

  1. Create subagent definitions in ~/MyCompany/project/.cursor/agents/

  2. Open Cursor IDE in ~/MyCompany/ (parent directory)

  3. Ask the agent to delegate a task to one of the subagents

  4. Observe: Agent responds with “I don’t have the tools to delegate” or similar generic message

Compare with:

  1. Open Cursor IDE directly in ~/MyCompany/project/

  2. Ask the agent to delegate the same task

  3. Observe: Delegation works as expected

Expected Behavior

Subagent delegation should work regardless of which parent directory the IDE is opened from, as long as the workspace contains the .cursor/agents/ directory. The agent
should be able to discover and delegate to subagents defined in any workspace subdirectory.

Questions

  1. Is subagent discovery limited to the exact workspace root where .cursor/agents/ exists?

  2. Should subagents be discoverable from parent directories, or is this the intended behavior?

  3. Is there a way to make subagents available across a multi-project workspace hierarchy?

  4. Why doesn’t Cursor CLI support subagent delegation even from the correct directory?

Additional Context

My project structure:

 1 │~/MyCompany/
 2 │├── project/
 3 ││   └── .cursor/
 4 ││       └── agents/
 5 ││           ├── developer.md
 6 ││           └── reviewer.md

This behavior makes it challenging to work with monorepo-style setups where you might want to open the IDE at a higher level but still leverage project-specific subagents.

Also, with the IDE open in parent directory of project/ if i explicitly ask the agent to work from MyCompany/project it then proceeds to invoke a general-purpose subagent over the defined developer agent

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image2064×1478 240 KB

reference: Cursor 2.4: Subagents - #27 by aamaralb

3

Just to close the loop here, I think we answered this over here!

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