There’s a lot of documentation floating around but the “settings” UI has been changed a lot and I can’t find where I can add a custom mode any longer. I have no option for it in the “agent” dropdown in the chat window and can’t find where to enable it in the settings.
Hey, thanks for the question. Custom Modes were removed in Cursor 2.1. This was an intentional change, not a bug.
There’s a larger discussion about it here: Custom Modes missing in Cursor 2.1.0 (VSCode 1.105.1)
What are custom modes being replaced with? They see like an absolutely vital pattern to support given the need to boot agents up often for context window management. Commands are not a replacement for custom modes/agents. Removing this functionality would be a dealbreaker for me. Even retail LLM tools have recognized the need to allow explicitly saving and invoking an agent with a custom prompt, so I hope this functionality is addressed in some fashion.
I understand your concern. Custom Modes were intentionally removed in Cursor 2.1, and many users have shared similar concerns in the main thread.
For system prompts and custom instructions, the suggested replacement is Commands Commands | Cursor Docs, but I agree it doesn’t cover everything Custom Modes could do, especially tool control, MCP, and pinning to specific models.
Your feedback is valuable and I’ll pass it along to the team. There are a few active feature requests to bring this functionality back:
- Return the Custom Modes features
- Explicit tool and mcp permissions for custom commands (Custom Mode removal breaks compliance)
I’d recommend adding your use case and a vote to those threads. The team tracks that feedback when planning product work.
Thank you for the thoughtful reply - I will do that. Have a great day.