Cursor just shipped a meaningful upgrade to its Automations platform -- the system that lets cloud agents run in the background, triggered by events across your dev stack rather than by you sitting at the keyboard. The headline addition is /automate, a new slash command that lets you describe what you want automated in plain English, and then has the agent configure the whole thing for you: triggers, instructions, and tools included.
The setup problem, solved
Until now, creating a Cursor Automation meant navigating a configuration UI -- picking triggers, writing prompts, selecting tools, and wiring up integrations manually. That friction was real, especially for teams that wanted to spin up automations quickly without becoming experts in the platform.
With /automate, you describe the task in plain language directly inside your local agent session, and Cursor configures the triggers, instructions, and tools for you.
Think of it as the agent bootstrapping its own future self. You tell it what to watch for and what to do, and it handles the plumbing.
This matters because Automations are fundamentally a way for engineers to break out of the "prompt-and-monitor" dynamic that defines most agent-based engineering. The less friction there is to setting one up, the more of them teams will actually run.
Five new GitHub triggers
The other big addition is a significant expansion of GitHub trigger support. Automations now support five additional GitHub triggers: issue comments, PR review comments, PR review submissions, review thread updates (when a thread is marked resolved or unresolved), and workflow run completions when a GitHub Actions run finishes on a PR or branch.
Don't miss what's next in AI
Join 300,000+ engineers and researchers who get the signal, not the noise.
- Full access to in-depth AI research breakdowns
- Be the first to know what's trending before it hits mainstream
- Daily curated papers, repos, and industry moves