Cursor's cloud agents no longer need a repo

Cursor’s Cloud Agents can now begin work without a GitHub connection or any other source-control link in place, the company said in an August 27 changelog entry. Selecting “Start from scratch” in the repo picker and prompting the agent is now enough; Cursor creates an Origin repo behind the scenes automatically. Once the build looks right, a “Create repo” button lets you save the work under a custom name with private or internal visibility set at that point, not before.

The change removes a specific piece of setup friction: previously, spinning up a Cloud Agent to try an idea meant first creating and connecting a repository even for work you might throw away. Now the repo becomes a decision you make after you like what the agent produced, not a precondition for starting.

Live preview and one-click publish

Alongside the repo change, Cursor now port-forwards a Cloud Agent’s live environment directly to your browser, so you can interact with what it built, including using design mode, without a separate deployment step. Connecting a Vercel account and hitting publish gets you a live URL for the result. Together, the three pieces, no-repo start, in-browser preview, and one-click Vercel publish, compress the loop from prompt to a shareable, working build into a single flow inside Cursor rather than a sequence of separate tools.

This lands a little over a week after Cursor’s own Origin code hosting rolled out in early beta, and it fits the same direction: Cursor is building out its own hosting and deployment surface rather than treating GitHub and Vercel purely as external integrations. For teams evaluating Cursor’s Cloud Agents against other agentic coding tools, the practical test is how much of your prototyping workflow you can now keep inside one product instead of stitching it together yourself.