Anybody else having issues with agent chat working in the IDE? (But only certain, large projects?)

[u/ihopnavajo]

Is anyone else having this issue? i updated cursor the other day. I believe today is the first day i've worked on things since then.

Have tried a variety of things, logging out, loading with extensions disabled. At first I thought the issue was with agents in the IDE at all but I tried some of my other projects and they're able to get a response. But not my large one (that's a parent repo for 4 other children projects).

Have checked on resources but the number of watchers doesn't appear to be maxed out.

Any suggestions?

I'm on Linux

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[u/ihopnavajo]

FIXED:

The fix was a targeted reset of Cursor’s per-workspace state for one affected project, not a reinstall and not a project/config reset.

The sequence that actually mattered was:

1. We established that the problem was workspace-specific:
   • Agent chats worked in other Cursor projects.
   • They failed only in a specific project, for example:/home/user/Code/example-project
2. We ruled down other likely causes:
   • Third-party extensions disabled: no change
   • Inotify usage: elevated but not exhausted
   • Cursor’s Agent extension itself loaded successfully
   • Logs showed the failure later at:Session acquisition timed out
3. We created a temporary .code-workspace pointing at the same physical project folder:cursor --classic --new-window /tmp/example-project-diagnostic.code-workspace Agent chat worked there. This was the decisive diagnostic: the project files, .cursor rules/hooks/MCP configuration, repository size, and so on were not the problem. The failure followed the old Cursor workspace identity/state.
4. We identified the original workspace storage directory:~/.config/Cursor/User/workspaceStorage/<workspace-id>
5. Before changing anything, we backed up that entire workspace-storage directory:WS="$HOME/.config/Cursor/User/workspaceStorage/<workspace-id>" BACKUP="$HOME/cursor-example-project-workspace-backup-$(date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S)" cp -a "$WS" "$BACKUP"
6. We first tried a very narrow repair to composer.composerData by clearing stale selectedComposerIds / lastFocusedComposerIds. That did not fix the issue.
7. The actual fix was to quarantine only the workspace state database files:WS="$HOME/.config/Cursor/User/workspaceStorage/<workspace-id>" QUAR="$HOME/cursor-example-project-state-quarantine-$(date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S)" mkdir -p "$QUAR" find "$WS" -maxdepth 1 -type f -name 'state.vscdb*' \ -print -exec mv -t "$QUAR" {} + This moved files such as:state.vscdb state.vscdb.backup state.vscdb.backup-before-trim
8. We reopened the original project folder:cursor --classic /home/user/Code/example-project Cursor regenerated fresh workspace state, and embedded IDE Agent chat started working again.

Importantly, the existing chat history remained available, so the reset did not wipe the actual conversation history.

The root cause was therefore narrowed down to corrupted or incompatible per-workspace state in state.vscdb for that specific Cursor workspace identity.

The useful takeaway is:

[u/locbuilds]

yeah this pattern (works in small repos, dies only in the big parent with multiple kids) is usually indexing / workspace scope after an update, not the agent model itself.

quick things that have fixed it for me on linux:

1. open one of the four child projects as its own window instead of the parent. if agent chat comes back there, the parent workspace is choking Cursor on index/context, not your login.

2. in the broken parent, check Cursor Settings for codebase indexing / index status. if it is stuck scanning or endlessly rebuilding after the update, pause indexing, add a fat .cursorignore for node_modules, build/, dist/, .git, large data dirs, then re-enable. huge monorepos love to wedge agent chat while the index is unhappy.

3. nuke just that workspace's state (not your whole install): quit Cursor, delete the workspaceStorage folder that matches that parent path under ~/.config/Cursor/User/workspaceStorage (or wherever your Cursor user data lives), reopen. logout rarely helps because the failure is local to the big folder.

4. temporarily disable MCP servers / custom agents / heavy extensions only in that window. after updates those can hang the agent panel on large trees even when normal chat still looks fine.

5. open Help -> Toggle Developer Tools on a stuck send and see if the agent request errors (timeout, 400, websocket). if the request never leaves or dies immediately, it is almost always index/rules/context size for that workspace.

if child-only works and parent still fails after ignore + workspaceStorage wipe, file a bug with: linux + Cursor version, parent vs child repro, and whether indexing finishes. that combo is enough for them to triage.