Background Agents Are the Future of AI Software Delivery

Cursor just rolled out a major update to its AI coding agents this week enabling it to run in parallel on a dedicated cloud virtual machine. But this isn't a story about cursor. It's a saga on autonomous background agents and the future of software delivery. Command AI Through cursor we've had background tasks. That's been a thing for for a little while. But I think this is more of a an automatic way of doing things, right? Go on, let's watch this. Let's chill out for a little bit. We gave cursor agents their own computers and now they can test their changes and come back with a video recording of what they worked on. Let's take a look at what that actually So here's an agent that we kicked off. This was sometime a couple weeks ago when we were launching our long-running agents. So we needed to make sure that it's the long-running agent. That has So we needed to pick a We gave it some instructions. Later came back with a video. And so here it's using mouse and keyboard like a human. And after it implemented the code front and back end strung it through whatever, it is testing to make sure that it works and also recording it so that you can see that it works. I can just watch this video in a few seconds. So nothing crazy. But we are still starting to see more and more of this. And and apparently you can it can run for like 10, 20 tasks. And you know, I'm not a massive fan of cursor anymore to be honest. I don't I don't use it too much. But what I gave you a sneak peek of is that cloud code has this new remote control feature as well, which again in a similar sort of way you're sending you're sending your task off to the cloud. Now you could already do this with if you in cloud code if you type and and then that will send it to the background as a background task which and and inevitably just sends it up to the cloud. But it's a way that you can then interact with it um on your phone. So, remote control here. You can actually interact with it on your phone. Now, I actually thought this was already possible, to be honest. I'm yet to see like what difference this is. Again, I'll be I'll release a video on this on my channel [gasps] actually doing the difference between background and remote control. But it's good to see. The other thing I wanted to share was this beautiful website, by the way. I just really like this website. It's so smooth. And this website is talking about and we spoke earlier about new paradigms, new ways of working with the Figma MCP, and embracing it. This I read through this and it's essentially talking about the same sort of thing. Where the bottlenecks are and this is why you've got this graphic here. There's bottlenecks everywhere. And how can we alleviate these bottlenecks? Basically, having agents automatically agents that run in the background. Where you aren't you aren't necessarily coding. You aren't necessarily writing I mean, we're not coding anyway, right? Cuz of AI. But the point is it's like they um they talk about um testing and uh we'll go back up to here, actually. Planning, code review, um testing, uh deployment, probably. Yeah, deployments and things like that. And where can we stick agents here in this pipeline to enable some of this stuff? I set up a background agent using Oz, which is Warp, which is the terminal that I use, that every week just looks to improve the website, right? It's just kind of doing its thing. Um I also set one off with our video when I first spoke about Oz on the Command AI channel, I scheduled an agent to do accessibility reviews and things like this. Like, is it a case that, you know, as developers, we are just implementing the basic thing and then it runs through all of these to do it? Or, are we doing any of this sort of stuff? And our websites are a living organisms. Comments come in, data comes in, maybe it's analytics, maybe it's feedback on a on a forum or something like that. And our AI is constantly analyzing all of this data. Really, you're there to verify what it Hey, we we had 300 new users on this page and they dropped off at this point. Do you want to move this section hot Whatever the comment is, whatever the analysis is from the agent, it sends its request to you and all you're doing is saying, "Yes." You're the You're the kind of final brain in all of this. And this is what I'm really, really excited about. This whole I I love this website. It's so cool. This is a really, really nice read. Establish background agent primitives. There we go. So, it's really got some practical advice here. Sandbox is a tool, agent is dev environment. Enforce the run run time, not prompt. So, that's that's quite cool. Give this a read and and and really embrace what it's talking about cuz I think we we're really going to be entering a new age of background agents just running around doing their thing. The final thing I wanted to share with you, which, to be honest, has kind of been solved. But, co-ord Coordinating a tree of trees of AI agents. So, this guy, I don't know, JK, June Kim, speaks about a bunch of little orchestration tools out there, all right? Open AI's swarm, this is one that got released. Um Claude has just updated this week with their um agent teams, or last week maybe. Um he talks about this tool that he's created that sends in basically he really goes into it here. He basically sends an agent into understand a task and understands what sub-agents, what agents need to orchestrate uh or to fulfill this challenge, and where do the dependencies lie? Something that we used to use Taskmaster for, but now I as I said, I literally played around with Claude's agent teams today. Really great. Uh it it it then sets up those agents and and figures them out. Migrate API from Rest to GraphQL, active spawn audit, uh a research, how many concurrent agents um do you serve? Oh, this is kind of a going on, but it you can see that it's um using different agents to do different things, and you can again, this is his tool, so you know, if you want to look into it, definitely go and do it, but I used I used uh Claude code. You can actually specify what agents you want, and maybe there's a slash command or a skill for um I don't know, you know, building a front-end uh feature that you have a research agent, then you have a front-end and uh um architect agent and all this and that and the other. And for me, it's a lot more deterministic than thinking that um Claude code is just going to pick up on a sub-agent to do these things. I'd rather it happen you know, I I actually tell it to go build an agent team. It was really cool um to watch them work, but it again, chewed through my tokens, and I'm not even on the max plan at the moment, just cuz I'm trialing Codex. But, yeah. That's agent orchestration. Um multiple teams. Obviously, lots of people were talking about this right now, and I cannot stress how much I think that we need to look into agents and and agent orchestration and things like that. I've heard rumors that there's going to be some $500 a month plans on things like Claude Code and Chat GPT and things like that, where you know, I'm even considering the $200 a month plan on Claude Code just because I'm using AI so much more now. I'm using AI for absolutely everything. I do the animations on this channel, which I used to remotion skill for all that. I use it to update, obviously, my open claw, things like this. I'm just using AI for everything right now. This is part of a larger conversation on my show, Command AI, which we stream live every single week. We discuss the news and all things related to AI in the world of design and web. Catch us next week and join in the banter. Command AI