Cursor Agent SDK vs OpenAI Agents SDK

Cursor Agent SDK

An agent-as-code framework with typed tools, declared read and write effects that drive retries and dry runs, an approval gate per tool and evals that assert on tool calls. It's closed source, every model turn runs through Cursor's backend on a Cursor plan, local sandboxing is off by default, and the changelog has two entries.

OpenAI Agents SDK

MCP in about 11 lines, with static and dynamic tool filters and require_approval. Tracing on by default, with model and tool content, sent to OpenAI.

Cursor Agent SDK

1. Install @grok/agent-sdk, not @cursor/agent-sdk from the launch post. That name answers 404 on npm
2. Set local.sandbox before a turn reads webhook payloads, pull request diffs or chat. Without it shell commands auto-approve with the host's credentials
3. Give every tool an effect. A tool without one counts as a write, runs once and is stubbed in dry runs
4. Start agent-sdk serve with --bearer-token on any shared host. --allow-anonymous admits every caller as one principal
5. Delete bot/hooks/memory.ts when sessions serve different people. The journal shares each turn's message and result with later turns

OpenAI Agents SDK

1. Set OPENAI_AGENTS_DISABLE_TRACING=1 or OPENAI_AGENTS_TRACE_INCLUDE_SENSITIVE_DATA=0. On versions before 0.24.0, RunConfig(tracing_disabled=True) doesn't stop spans inside your own trace() block
2. Pin to a minor version. Each 0.Y can break
3. Set require_approval on MCP servers that write
4. Name the model explicitly. The default changed in 0.20.0
5. Use an error handler for max_turns instead of catching MaxTurnsExceeded