Cursor CLI Tool: A Game-Changing AI Coding Assistant

Cursor has been making huge strides as they have now introduced the Cursor CLI tool. This was truly unexpected as Cursor just rolled out with this new update recently, which lets you interact with AI agents directly from your terminal to write, review, and modify code.

Whether you want to have an interactive terminal interface for real-time collaboration or print automation for scripts and CI pipelines, the CLI puts powerful AI coding assistance exactly where you want to work.

Currently, it’s in beta, but you already have incredible features where you can use the Cursor agent from the CLI or run it headlessly in any environment.

You can work with the agent directly within the editor of Cursor, or run multiple agents in parallel right in the terminal or remotely. It’s perfect for automation, collaborative development, and AI-assisted code generation without leaving your workflow.

Key Features of Cursor CLI

Review and Control Agent Edits

With the Cursor CLI, you have the ability to review agent edits, where you have the ability for accessing diff edits, approving the changes, tweaking it, or rejecting AI changes directly within your terminal. You can steer in real time, meaning that you can direct the agent’s next move while it’s actually coding, which is awesome.

Custom Rules and Configuration

You can even set your own rules, so you can set Cursor rules directly within the terminal. You also have it so that you can define exactly how the agent works with the Agent MD or with custom rules and MCPS. And if you do already have the Cursor subscription, you don’t even need to have to pay for something; you can just access all these state-of-the-art models directly within the CLI. You can also use it with your preferred IDE as well, and then you can write powerful scripts and automations directly within the terminal.

Head-to-Head Comparison: Cloud Code vs Codeex vs Cursor CLI

Now, here is a head-on head battle with Cloud Code versus Codeex versus Cursor CLI. And this is where the task was to build a Next.js app with Tailwind for chats and components for collecting and showcasing customer feedback. And all of them took approximately 30 minutes each to actually build out this application.

Cloud Code Performance

• Used the Opus 4.1 model • Pretty fast in delivering a working demo that needed prompts to make the interaction • Created a pretty simple basic app • Used 33k tokens

Codeex Performance

• OpenAI’s very own CLI tool or coding agent • Failed to actually produce a working app after 30 minutes • Used GPT-5, which is kind of shocking • Got stuck setting up Tailwind 4 and ended up compiling errors • Used 102k tokens

Cursor CLI Performance

• Used the GPT-5 model • Pretty slow, but had the best generation in my opinion • The first app you saw within this demo was the one that was generated with Cursor CLI • Eventually delivered the functional, interactive app, which looked really minimal, clean design, and looked really less AI generated • Code quality output was way better than what I saw with Cloud Code • Used 188k tokens, that is a lot of tokens

Key Takeaways from the Comparison

The takeaway is that Opus 4.1 is a really capable model, but when you combine it with something like Cursor CLI, you’re going to get better generations than you would with the GPT-5 model. And this just ends up showcasing that Cursor CLI has a lot of potential because of its unmatched quality in terms of its output, as well as how well it is in terms of its potential if it can optimize token usage.

Getting Started with Cursor CLI

But now that we have gotten all that out of the way, let’s now showcase how you can get started. It’s simple as just installing it with this command. Go ahead and open up your command prompt, and what I want you to do is simply go ahead and paste in this command within your terminal, and it’s easy as that. You can start installing the packages, and you can see right away the next step is to add to your path, which you can do, and then you also have the ability to start using Cursor Agent directly over here with the following command, which is cursor-agent.

Authentication Process

And after you have set the path, you’re going to need to start up the Cursor CLI by simply typing in that command I mentioned, which is cursor-agent. This will prompt you to sign in with your browser. Obviously, if you don’t have an account with Cursor, you can get started for free ’cause they do have a free tier, and it does let you access the CLI tool completely for free as well. You’re just going to need to bring your own API key.

Now, I’m simply going ahead and logging into Cursor CLI now, and once I’ve done this, I can then access it directly within my CLI within a couple seconds. And there we go, we have it authenticated, and we can start working with the CLI tool. And you can see right now that I’m using the OpenAI GPT-5 model with a free account with Cursor.

Exploring CLI Commands and Features

Now, first things first is getting familiarized with all the commands. If you press on slash, you can see that there’s a couple of different commands that you have.

Available Commands:

• Model Selection: You have the ability to set whatever model you want to use that Cursor actually provides. So if I click on model, you can set it to the GPT model, you have Sonnet 4, as well as the new Cloud 4.1 Opus model. We’re going to keep it as the Opus ’cause I believe it is a bit better with the CLI tool.

• Auto Run: You have the ability to have it on auto run. This is where if you enable this, it’s going to be able to autonomously work on generating your code based off the deployed agents that are working on your task.

• Additional Features: You’ll have the ability to start a new chat with this command, clear things, Vim for toggling the keys, and if you’d like, you can set the MCPS within the MCP JSON file that’s linked to your path with the Cursor application itself, as well as the rules. So this way, these two defined sets can direct the agents of the CLI tool to work in a particular manner that you set within these two different folders.

Live Demo: Building a Note-Taking App

Now let’s showcase this in action. I want to create this note-taking app, and it is where I wanted to have a functional drag-and-drop UI and that it also adds the ability to track people’s schedules. This is where I’m also requesting it to test out its creativity to add as many features as possible. And then once you’re ready, you can go ahead and click enter. This is where it’s going to be able to then start processing your prompt of creating the note-taking app. And you can see that I have it on auto run, and you notice that I’ve changed it back to GPT-5. This is because with my tier, I’m not able to use the Cloud 4.1 at this current moment, which is why I had to fall back to the GPT-5.

The Development Process

Now, right away it is working on building out a plan using the reasoning capabilities of the new GPT-5 model. And right now it is looking like it’s deploying the planning agents to first help build the actual skeleton of the application and then deploying other agents to work on different components. And you can actually get a live preview of the amount of tokens that are being used for this generation. And you can see right now I’m going to scaffold a self-contained browser-based app, and it is showcasing all the features that it’s going to add. And right now you can see the edit it’s making through the index.html file. Now, if I didn’t have auto run on, I would be able to see all the different div changes being made live in action. And if you want, you can actually write directly within the terminal to edit an individual file, which is really impressive.

Results and App Quality

So it looks like quite quickly it was able to return the generation, and you can see that it did a pretty good job in writing all the code as well as showcases all the changes it has made. I’m going to go ahead and open this up so that we can visualize the app that it has created. And there we go, this is our note and schedule taking app. And I can definitely tell you that the quality of output is amazing with the Cursor CLI tool. In one shot, it was able to build this, and you can see that you have the ability to add new notes, which could be then added to the notes tab.

Now it looks like the formatting is off a little bit, and it did look like it created the drag-and-drop functionality. There’s also a built-in calendar, and I don’t believe everything else was fully coded out. But overall, this is a pretty decent looking app. Not everything looks great, but overall it did get the job done, and it was able to do it in a single shot.

Final Thoughts

If you like this article and would love to support the channel, you can consider donating to my channel through the Super Thanks option below, or you can consider joining our private Discord where you can access multiple subscriptions to different AI tools for free on a monthly basis, plus daily AI news and exclusive content, plus a lot more. Overall, Cursor’s CLI tool is a great new addition to the community, and I really love what you can actually do with it