1 min lesson
Agent workflow backend
Use "The agent backend is the surface Cursor lives or dies on" to describe the practical rule.
Step 1 of 2
The agent backend is the surface Cursor lives or dies on. An Engineering Manager, Core Services who treats it as plumbing will lose the room - treat it as the product, because it is.
A single agent run is not a request. It is a long-running, stateful session that may take seconds or minutes, calls an LLM many times, touches the user's files and SCM and streams partial results the whole way. Modeling that as synchronous request/response is the first mistake an interviewer will probe for.
The shape you want is a durable workflow: accept the run, persist its intent, drive it forward through a queue and stream progress out of band. If the box handling step 7 dies, step 8 should resume from durable state somewhere else.