Editor agents

An editor agent is the same loop, hosted by the editor. It starts from what you have open: the current file, a selection, the project’s files, and sometimes the editor’s own diagnostics. Edits appear inline or as a diff you accept or reject, and terminal commands run in the editor’s terminal. Cursor describes its Agent as three parts: instructions (the system prompt and rules), tools (file editing, codebase search, terminal) and a model.

The editor and the agent are increasingly separate choices. VS Code calls the runtime that drives the loop an agent harness and can host Copilot, Claude and Codex harnesses; Claude Code and Codex both ship extensions for VS Code and its forks such as Cursor and Windsurf. Pick an editor agent when you want to watch and steer every change; pick a terminal or cloud agent when you want to hand off a task and review the result.