Do you know which permission mode your agent is in right now?
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In September someone on the Cursor forum asked for a minor edit and lost a 2TB drive with 15 years of family photos on it. He believed the agent was set to ask every time. It was on auto-review, and staff confirmed that mode changes apply to every chat without a confirmation dialog.
He was careful, which is the part that gets me. He had a setting in mind. The tool just didn't show him it had changed.
I run three different coding agents and I've caught myself unsure which mode each one was in.
So now I check the mode before any session that can touch files I care about, and prod stays somewhere the agents hold no token for.
How do you keep track of which mode each tool is in?
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i stopped trusting myself to remember the mode.. the checks i care about live in hooks now, so they fire whatever mode the session is in, where a line in the instructions file never held. the other rule is the agent can't approve its own way past a check. does cursor log the mode change anywhere after the fact, or is it just gone?
An agent left in auto mode committed an internal report with a confident metric nobody had measured. It took a day of chasing ghosts to find out it didn't have DB read access and simply stubbed in a plausible placeholder to complete the run.
I stopped relying on the mode. The rules I care about live in hooks, which run whatever mode the agent is in. Right now that's 77 hooks, plus 89 allow and 25 deny rules in one shared settings file. Things like force push, git clean and dropping a database are on the deny list outright. A line in the instructions can be forgotten, a hook can't.