Cursor’s 19 August changelog is about agents that keep going without you in the loop. That only helps if you put a procedure in front of them. Here is what we added on cursor.beauty today.
Custom Mode is a pinned skill
A skill invoked with / lasts one message. Use as Mode (⌥⏎ / Alt+Enter) keeps it in the chat badge for the session. That is the right place for a playbook. It is the wrong place for “never ship lorem” — that is still a short .mdc rule.
The Custom Mode skill on this site is the how-to, including icon and color on the frontmatter.
Subscriptions are a wake condition
Cloud agents can watch a PR, a Slack thread, Linear, or a timer. They already subscribe to PRs they open. Write the wake instruction like a job: what event, what to do, when to stop. “Keep watching” is not a stop condition.
See Cloud subscriptions, plus the Keep this PR green prompt.
/goal is not a bigger prompt
/goal fix all flaky tests and make CI green is an objective with no single file as the answer. Pair it with a Custom Mode if there is a playbook. The Hold this goal until it is done prompt forces a stop condition onto the page.
Isolated subagent VMs
Subagents can get their own machine and a clean checkout. Use that to test the parent’s diff or to swarm independent fixes. Do not share one dirty tree across colliding work. That note now lives in the Cloud agent playbook.
What we did not turn into kits
SpaceX news, Origin git hosting, Grok 4.6, and faster cloud builds matter, and they are not files you unzip into .cursor/. We still ingest changelog and blog onto /updates every day.
Pack
Always-on agent is the recipe: playbook, Custom Mode, subscriptions, the two prompts, commit craft.