Cursor CLI is an AI-powered command-line interface and integration tool designed to enhance developer productivity across various environments. It offers AI-driven assistance directly from the terminal and integrates seamlessly with existing IDEs and scripting workflows.

The core methodology revolves around leveraging state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs), including frontier models from providers such as Anthropic, OpenAI, and Gemini, to execute complex developer tasks. Users can interact with the CLI using natural language prompts, where / specifies commands and @ references files. The system allows for dynamic model selection via commands like /model auto, /model sonnet-4.5, /model gpt-5.2, /model opus-4.5, and /model grok, providing flexibility in choosing the most suitable AI for a given task.

In command-line operations, Cursor CLI's AI agent can interpret descriptive requests. For instance, a user can instruct the agent to "Add affine gap alignment" using Gotoh's algorithm and "fix the FASTA parser" within a specified repository, demonstrating its capability to understand and facilitate code modifications based on high-level instructions.

Beyond the command line, Cursor CLI extends its AI capabilities into automated scripting and development workflows. It enables the creation of powerful scripts for tasks such as automated documentation updates, security reviews, or the development of custom coding agents. A demonstrated use case involves an AI-powered code review script (simple-code-review.sh). This script utilizes the agent command with specific parameters (-p --force --output-format text) to instruct the AI to perform a comprehensive review. The AI is tasked with evaluating code quality and readability, identifying potential bugs or issues, assessing security considerations, and ensuring compliance with best practices. It then provides specific suggestions for improvement and outputs the detailed feedback to a designated file, review.txt.

The installation of Cursor CLI is executed via a simple curl command: curl https://cursor.com/install -fsS | bash, emphasizing ease of deployment and immediate integration into existing development setups, regardless of the environment. The tool aims to provide consistent functionality and access to cutting-edge AI models across different user configurations.