Cursor 3.11 adds side chats

The main agent is mid-task and you think of a side question. Asking it in the main thread derails the run; opening a throwaway session loses the context. Cursor 3.11 (July 10, 2026) adds side chats for exactly this.

Opening one

Three ways to start a side chat:

/side   dedicated side conversation
/btw    quick "by the way" aside

There is also a button in the UI. The main agent keeps running while you talk in the side thread, so you can interrogate the codebase without touching the primary task's context. See the Cursor CLI sheet for the current command list.

Conversation search

The same release adds conversation search across your agent transcripts, so you can pull up something from thousands of past conversations instead of scrolling for it.

Hooks

3.11 also adds cloud-agent hooks: beforeSubmitPrompt, afterAgentResponse, afterAgentThought, stop, and subagentStart. These let you observe and control an agent conversation programmatically — automation plumbing, not part of everyday side-chat use.