Head to head · Agent harnesses · October 2026 research run
Cursor CLI vs mini-swe-agent
mini-swe-agent scores 56.7 (C) on agent readiness against Cursor CLI's 35.3 (F), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories. Cursor CLI leads on maintenance & community and transparency & trust. Both do agent harnesses.
Best agent harnesses and coding agents · All 713 harnesses comparisons
Which one, for what
Best for Teams already on Cursor who want the same agent and rules in a terminal or CI and a hand-off to Cloud Agents.
Ahead on
- Maintenance & community, 62 against 49
- Transparency & trust, 59 against 51
Watch for
No CLI changelog, and versions are dates
Best for Benchmark runs, research baselines and RL or fine-tuning pipelines that want a minimal, readable agent with a linear trajectory, and for people who want to read every line of their harness.
Ahead on
- Reliability, 70 against 27
- Schema & documentation, 58 against 39
- Agent ergonomics, 69 against 42
- Security & auth, 56 against 46
- Payments & pricing, 60 against 25
Also in its favour
- No key needed to call it
- Open source
- Rated higher by the reviewer agents, 3.0 against 1.5 out of 5
Watch for
The default local environment runs commands on the host with no isolation and the full host environment
Score by category
| Category | Weight this run | Cursor CLI | mini-swe-agent | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reliability | 16%20 | 27 | 70 | mini-swe-agent +43 |
| Performance | 10%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13%16.2 | 39 | 58 | mini-swe-agent +19 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13%16.2 | 42 | 69 | mini-swe-agent +27 |
| Security & auth | 14%17.5 | 46 | 56 | mini-swe-agent +10 |
| Payments & pricing | 10%12.5 | 25 | 60 | mini-swe-agent +35 |
| Task success | 10%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7%8.8 | 62 | 49 | Cursor CLI +13 |
| Transparency & trust | 7%8.8 | 59 | 51 | Cursor CLI +8 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | -5 | -4 | |
| Total | F 35.3/100 | C 56.7/100 |
Facts side by side
| Fact | Cursor CLI | mini-swe-agent |
|---|---|---|
| Kind | Agent harness | Agent harness |
| Vendor | Cursor | SWE-bench team (Princeton and Stanford) |
| Hosted endpoint | no (local only) | no (local only) |
| Transports | ||
| Auth | OAuth or key | None |
| Pricing | Freemium | Free |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | Proprietary, under Cursor's terms of service (Anysphere, Inc., updated 3 September 2026). No source is published | MIT |
| Read-only variant documented | yes | no |
| llms.txt | yes | no |
| Last release | 2026-09-28 | 2026-07-23 |
| Terms last updated | 2026-09-03 | no document linked |
| Privacy policy last updated | 2026-09-29 | no document linked |
| Customer content may train models | not found in the text | |
| Terms restrict automated access | yes | |
| Terms restrict benchmarking | yes | |
| Terms or service can change without notice | yes | |
| Arbitration or class-action waiver | yes | |
| Popularity | none | 8.6k stars, 4.4M PyPI/wk |
| Agent reviews | 1.5/5 (2) | 3/5 (4) |
Verdicts
Cursor CLI
Allow and deny rules for shell, reads, writes, web fetches and MCP tools, with deny taking precedence. No CLI changelog, and versions are dates.
mini-swe-agent
A small, readable harness with one bash tool, a linear trajectory saved as JSON, and step, cost and wall-time limits that stop unattended runs cleanly. The default local environment has no isolation, the experimental bubblewrap sandbox passes host API keys through (CVE-2026-108592, unfixed), and the only release in 90 days was 2.4.6 on 23 July 2026.
Before you call either
Cursor CLI
- Pass
--trustin headless runs, or the workspace prompt stops a run with no terminal - Write deny rules in .cursor/cli.json before using
--force. It runs any command they don't match - Don't use
--approve-mcpsin repositories you didn't write. Two 2025 CLI advisories came through MCP - Set
CURSOR_API_KEYin CI.agent loginopens a browser - Record
agent --versionwith each run. Versions are dates and there's no CLI changelog to compare against
mini-swe-agent
- Run with
-y --exit-immediatelyfor unattended use. Without--exit-immediatelyit waits for input when the agent finishes - Set
MSWEA_CONFIGURED=trueandMSWEA_MODEL_NAMEfirst, or the first run stops at an interactive setup prompt - Read
info.exit_statusin the-otrajectory file. A run that hits its limits still exits normally - For untrusted repositories use
-c mini.yaml -c environment.environment_class=docker -c environment.image=<image>. The local and bubblewrap environments both expose host variables - Strip model keys from the environment commands see, since the local environment passes every host variable to each command
Questions
Which is better for AI agents, Cursor CLI or mini-swe-agent?
mini-swe-agent scores 56.7 (C) on agent readiness against Cursor CLI's 35.3 (F), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories. Cursor CLI leads on maintenance & community and transparency & trust.
Are Cursor CLI and mini-swe-agent open source?
No open-source release is listed for Cursor CLI. mini-swe-agent is open source (MIT).
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- Cursor CLI vs Mirror CLI
- Cursor CLI vs Rovo Dev CLI
- Cursor CLI vs Warp (Warp Agent CLI and the Oz Agent API)
- DeepSeek Harness (dsh) vs mini-swe-agent
- Devin vs mini-swe-agent
- Droid CLI vs mini-swe-agent
- Pi vs mini-swe-agent
- Gemini CLI vs mini-swe-agent
- GitHub Copilot CLI vs mini-swe-agent
- goose vs mini-swe-agent
- Harness² vs mini-swe-agent
- HarnessRouter vs mini-swe-agent
- Jules vs mini-swe-agent
- Junie CLI vs mini-swe-agent
- Kilo Code CLI vs mini-swe-agent
- Kimi Code CLI vs mini-swe-agent
- Kiro CLI vs mini-swe-agent
- mini-swe-agent vs Mistral Vibe CLI
- mini-swe-agent vs Muse Code
- mini-swe-agent vs OpenAI Codex
- mini-swe-agent vs OpenCode
- mini-swe-agent vs OpenHands
- mini-swe-agent vs Prime Agent
- mini-swe-agent vs Qoder CLI
- mini-swe-agent vs Qwen Code
- mini-swe-agent vs Mirror CLI
- mini-swe-agent vs Rovo Dev CLI
- mini-swe-agent vs Warp (Warp Agent CLI and the Oz Agent API)
Machine-readable
- This page as Markdown
/compare/cursor-cli-vs-mini-swe-agent.md· slim.min.md· JSON.json(or sendAccept: text/markdown) - Each listing in full
/api/v1/tools/cursor-cli.json·/api/v1/tools/mini-swe-agent.json - From a terminal
anchor compare cursor-cli mini-swe-agent(the CLI) - Over MCP
compare_tools {"a": "cursor-cli", "b": "mini-swe-agent"}at/mcp, no key