Cursor has launched Projects, in beta to all users. It is aimed at work that does not fit in one session — features, migrations, whole applications — and it changes what the unit of work is.
What it does
A coordinator agent plans the work and delegates it to implementation agents. Cursor describes delegation to thousands of subagents, with execution in the cloud that continues while your laptop is closed.
Context is held in shared files that sync across all agents and accumulate over time, so the system is meant to get more effective at a given codebase the longer it works on it. Subscriptions let a project monitor Slack channels, run on a schedule and track pull requests — meaning it can act without being prompted.
What is actually new here
Not the agents. The coordination layer. Most agent tooling still assumes a person decomposes the task and supervises each piece; Projects moves decomposition into the system and keeps state across months rather than across one conversation.
Recurring unprompted work is the sharper change. An agent that acts on a schedule or a Slack message is closer to a background service than to an editor feature, and it needs to be managed like one.
The trade-off
Long-lived accumulated context is exactly what makes these systems useful and exactly what makes them hard to audit. When a coordinator delegates to many subagents over months, answering "why did it do that" requires the shared context files to be readable by a human, not just by the model.
The same applies to unprompted runs. Anything that can open a pull request on a schedule needs the same review discipline as a colleague who can — arguably more, because nobody is watching the clock on its behalf.
Who should look at it
Teams carrying long migrations or persistent maintenance backlogs — the work that never gets prioritised because it never fits in a sprint. That is the shape Projects is built for. For single-session tasks it adds coordination overhead without a payoff.