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Use Beads with Cursor through a project rules file and agent lifecycle hooks. The hooks are what keep Beads context alive across compaction — without them, Cursor only sees the static rules file and the agent must remember to run bd prime itself (which it often forgets after a context compaction). 
bd setup cursor
bd setup cursor --check
bd setup cursor installs three things:
  • .cursor/rules/beads.mdc — an always-applied rule with the canonical Beads workflow guidance (the same content every other editor integration uses), so it stays in sync as the workflow evolves. Because it is always applied, Cursor re-includes it every turn, including after a compaction.
  • .agents/skills/beads/SKILL.md — the Beads agent skill, which Cursor loads natively from .agents/skills/ (the same skill the Codex integration installs). It gives the agent an on-demand, progressive-disclosure reference for bd.
  • .cursor/hooks.json — agent hooks that run the hidden bd cursor-hook command at key points in the session. Existing (non-Beads) hooks in this file are preserved.
The managed hooks are:
EventWhat it does
sessionStartInjects full bd prime output so the agent starts every session already knowing the workflow, ready work, and project memories.
preCompactArms a one-shot marker and shows a short reminder that context will be restored.
postToolUseAfter a compaction, re-injects bd prime exactly once on the next tool call, then no-ops.
Requirements Hooks run in the Cursor IDE and in recent cursor-agent CLI builds (verified on the 2026.06 line; early-2026 CLI builds only fired shell hooks). After setup, restart Cursor or start a new cursor-agent session so the hooks load.The hook entries call bd cursor-hook, which Cursor resolves on PATH — exactly like the Claude Code and Codex hooks. But that PATH is not your shell’s: Cursor rebuilds it for hook subprocesses and prepends its own directories, so a stale bd earlier in that order silently wins and every hook fails with no visible error. The classic case is an old Homebrew bd (without the cursor-hook command) shadowing a newer build. Make sure the first bd Cursor finds is current — ~/.local/bin and ~/go/bin sort ahead of Homebrew in Cursor’s PATH, so installing or symlinking bd there is a reliable way to win resolution.In the CLI, the workspace must also be trusted — hooks do not run in an untrusted workspace.
Auto-installed by bd init You usually don’t need to run bd setup cursor by hand. bd init installs the Cursor integration automatically (the same way it sets up Claude Code and Codex), and stages .cursor/ so the rules + hooks are committed with your repo. Run bd setup cursor only to (re)install into an existing project or to repair drift.

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Global install (all projects)

To wire the hooks once for every project instead of per-repo: 
bd setup cursor --global          # writes ~/.cursor/hooks.json
bd setup cursor --check --global
bd setup cursor --remove --global
Global scope installs the hooks and the agent skill (~/.agents/skills/beads), but not a rules file. Cursor has no reliable file-based global rules location — global rules belong in Cursor Settings → Rules — so .cursor/rules/beads.mdc is project-scoped. This is fine in practice: the global sessionStart hook already injects the full bd prime context into every project, which supersedes the static rule.

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Why these specific hooks

The Claude Code / Codex integrations recover from compaction with a dedicated post-compaction event plus a prompt-submission hook. Cursor’s hook API doesn’t offer equivalents, so the recovery is built from what Cursor can do:
  • Cursor has no post-compaction hook — only preCompact, which is observational and “cannot block or modify the compaction behavior” (its only output is user_message). So preCompact just arms a one-shot marker and notifies you.
  • Only two hooks can inject model-visible context (additional_context): sessionStart and postToolUse. sessionStart fires only when a new conversation is created — not after a compaction, and not when resuming with cursor-agent --continue. preCompact and postToolUse do fire in resumed sessions, so compaction recovery still works under --continue; only the one-time start-of-session injection is skipped (the resumed conversation already contains it).
  • That makes postToolUse the only place to re-inject bd prime after a compaction — which the docs explicitly support (“Useful for … injecting context”).
Limitation Post-compaction recovery fires on the next tool call. If you have a purely conversational turn right after a compaction (no tool use), the refresh waits until the next tool runs — no Cursor hook can inject context on a bare prompt. Agent sessions call tools often, so in practice this is quick. You can always run bd prime manually to force a refresh.

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Verifying it works (CLI, no hooks pane)

The cursor-agent CLI has no hooks output pane, so verify the hooks directly: 
# sessionStart should return {"continue": true, "additional_context": "...bd prime..."}
echo '{"hook_event_name":"sessionStart","workspace_roots":["'"$PWD"'"]}' \
  | bd cursor-hook sessionStart | jq .

# In a real session, the agent should know your bd workflow without being told,
# and should recover it after a compaction without you running `bd prime`.
If additional_context is empty, the directory is not a Beads workspace yet (run bd init) or bd is not on Cursor’s PATH. Note this command runs your shell’s bd; Cursor may resolve a different one for hooks (see Requirements above), so a passing check here doesn’t guarantee Cursor runs the same build. bd doctor also reports three Cursor checks (under integration diagnostics), paralleling the Claude checks:
  • Cursor Integration — flags when Cursor is in use but the hooks aren’t installed.
  • Cursor Settings Health — errors if .cursor/hooks.json is malformed JSON (which would silently disable every hook).
  • Cursor Hook Completeness — warns if only some of the three managed events are installed (e.g. after a hand-edit), since recovery needs all three.

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Remove

bd setup cursor --remove
This removes the rules file and the Beads-managed hook entries while leaving any of your own hooks in .cursor/hooks.json intact. The shared agent skill (.agents/skills/beads) is removed too — unless the Codex integration is still installed, in which case it is kept because both integrations use it.