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Investigate: cursor crewmate self-exits to a bare shell on task completion (dead crew pane) #19

Description

@Quidge

Observed behavior (2026-08-06)

A cursor (Composer 2.5) crewmate self-exited the cursor-agent TUI and dropped its crew window to a bare bash shell after completing its task — it had finished the work and opened the PR, then the agent was simply gone. This differs from the claude crew adapter, which stays parked at an idle composer after a turn.

Observed on the fm-oikos-expenses-add-list crew (worktree ~/.treehouse/oikos-ba7cb0/1/oikos, branch fm/oikos-expenses-add-list): the pane showed the finished work + PR link, a Composer 2.5 · 27 files edited footer, then a lirum@myrmex:...$ shell prompt with the agent no longer running.

Why it's worth capturing

Firstmate's supervision assumes a live crew pane it can steer, read state from, and reconcile at teardown. A cursor crew that self-exits to a shell:

  • can no longer be steered (agent gone; only bash remains),
  • can be misread by liveness/state checks (a pane is present, but there is no agent),
  • lingers as a dead shell that is not obviously reconciled or torn down.

No work was lost in the observed case (the PR completed and the supervising secondmate carried on), so this is a capture, not a fire.

For a later investigation (not now)

Dig into whether this is cursor-agent's standard on-completion behavior, whether a keep-alive/interactive launch mode avoids it, how firstmate should detect and reconcile the exit (steer/state/teardown), and whether the cursor adapter needs a patch. Refs: .agents/skills/harness-adapters (cursor section), data/cursor-verify/report.md.

Deliberately not theorizing the cause or fix here — this is a behavior-capture placeholder for a later dig.

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