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April 3, 20265 min readNews

Cursor Launches Cursor 3, a New Agent-First Interface Built from Scratch

Cursor 3 introduces the Agents Window, a unified workspace for running parallel AI coding agents locally and in the cloud.

Tomas Laurinavicius
Tomas Laurinavicius
Cursor Launches Cursor 3

Cursor launched Cursor 3 on April 2, 2026, introducing a new interface built from scratch to manage fleets of AI coding agents. The release marks the company's most significant product shift since it forked VS Code to create its original editor.

The new interface, called the Agents Window, puts local and cloud agents side by side in a unified sidebar. It lets engineers run as many agents as they want in parallel, move sessions between environments, and review and commit their work without leaving the window. Cursor describes it as a direct response to the friction engineers face managing multiple AI tools, terminals, and conversations simultaneously.

What's in Cursor 3

The centerpiece is the Agents Window, accessible via Cmd+Shift+P in the existing Cursor app. It runs alongside the IDE rather than replacing it.

All agents appear in a single sidebar regardless of where they were started: local machines, cloud, mobile, web, Slack, GitHub, or Linear. Cloud agents produce demos and screenshots of their work so engineers can verify progress without pulling down the code. When a cloud session needs hands-on testing, moving it to a local environment takes one action. Moving in the opposite direction (local to cloud) lets a session keep running after a laptop closes.

The interface is inherently multi-workspace. Engineers can work across multiple repositories simultaneously from one window, a pattern that mirrors how software teams distribute work across branches and services.

Other additions include a redesigned diffs view for reviewing changes and managing pull requests, a Cursor Marketplace with hundreds of plugins extending agents with MCPs, skills, and subagents, and new commands including /worktree for isolated task execution and /best-of-n for running multiple model instances and comparing outputs. Enterprise teams get new admin controls covering security and attribution settings.

Cursor's own Composer 2 model, launched in March, is integrated into the new interface. Composer 2 is priced at $0.50 per million input tokens and $2.50 per million output tokens, and the company says it delivers large improvements over earlier versions on coding benchmarks.

What Cursor Says

Cursor frames Cursor 3 as a product for the third era of AI software development, a term the company introduced in a February 2026 essay by CEO Michael Truell.

The first era was tab autocomplete. The second was synchronous prompt-and-response agents. The third is defined by agents that run autonomously over longer timescales with less human direction. Truell wrote that more than one-third of the pull requests Cursor's own team merges are now created by agents running on cloud computers.

"Engineers are still micromanaging individual agents, trying to keep track of different conversations, and jumping between multiple terminals, tools, and windows," the Cursor 3 announcement states. The new interface is designed to fix that.

Engineering head Jonas Nelle told WIRED the profession has "completely changed" as a result of agentic coding tools.

Lee Robinson, VP of Product at Vercel, noted that building the agent interface as a separate window also improves the existing IDE: "Making this new agent interface as a separate window actually also makes the Cursor 2.0 IDE better!"

The Competitive Backdrop

Cursor 3 arrives as competition in AI coding tools has intensified significantly. WIRED described the release as Cursor's response to Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex, both of which have attracted millions of developers in recent months.

Cursor has faced some attrition at the individual developer level as Claude Code gained ground, particularly among developers who found it more competitively priced. But enterprise customers, who now account for approximately 60% of Cursor's revenue according to Bloomberg, have offset that attrition. TechCrunch reported in March that Cursor's annualized revenue run rate surpassed $2 billion, doubling over the prior three months.

Cursor was last valued at $29.3 billion following a $2.3 billion funding round co-led by Accel and Coatue in November 2025. The company, founded in 2022 as Anysphere, has grown from a tool for individual developers into a platform increasingly targeting engineering organizations.

Other tools competing in the same space include Conductor, which raised $22 million in March 2026 to orchestrate parallel coding agents, Replit, Cognition, and Lovable.

What's Next

Cursor says it will continue investing in the underlying IDE alongside the new agent interface, with the stated goal of making codebases "self-driving." The company acknowledges that more powerful coding models will unlock interaction patterns that don't yet exist, and that the interface for building software will change again.

The Agents Window is available now to all Cursor users. Upgrade the app and use Cmd+Shift+P → Agents Window to access it.

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