Cursor background agents vs Claude Code

Cursor background agents vs Claude Code is not really a contest. Many teams run both on one codebase, a Cursor background agent in the cloud and Claude Code on a laptop. They coexist fine until their changes meet. Two agents can touch code that depends on each other, each pass its own tests, and still break once the branches merge. That is the Cursor background agents conflict most teams hit.

Niklas Femerstrand, founder · 23 Oct 2026

The short answer

The two tools sit in different places. A Cursor background agent runs on Cursor's machines, on its own branch, and opens a pull request when it is done. Claude Code runs on your machine, in a git worktree, and you merge it yourself. Both are safe alone. The risk starts when two of them change the same repository at once, because git will merge clean work that does not fit together.

Where each one runs

A Cursor background agent takes a task, works on a branch on Cursor's infrastructure, and you follow it from the editor or from Slack (Cursor docs, Background agents). Claude Code runs a worktree under .claude/worktrees/ on your own disk (Anthropic, Run parallel sessions with worktrees). One ends as a pull request on GitHub. The other ends as a branch you merge. Both land on the same main branch in the end.

The collision on one codebase

Put both on one repository and you have two changes in flight that neither tool knows about. A background agent adds a field to a function. Claude Code, at the same time, writes a caller that uses the old shape of that function. Each branch builds and tests on its own. Git then merges them with no conflict, because they touched different lines, and the merged code is wrong. This kind is a semantic conflict, and git cannot see it.

We measured this. We replayed 733 pairs of overlapping agent pull requests from public GitHub projects and merged each pair. Git reported a textual conflict in 179 of them, about one in four. Of the 44 clean merges we could test on both sides and on the merge, one no longer built. The full write-up is in How often do AI agent pull requests break each other? It also matters because most agent pull requests overlap. Xu et al. found 79.4% of 33,596 agent pull requests were open alongside another in the same repository (arXiv 2607.04697).

Run both without a broken merge

You do not have to choose one tool. You have to test the combination before main moves. The background agent's work arrives as a pull request, so compare it with your local branch before you merge either.

git fetch origin pull/214/head:cursor-214   # the background agent's PR branch
git merge-tree --write-tree --name-only cursor-214 my-claude-branch
echo $?    # 0 clean, 1 textual conflict

A clean exit means the lines do not clash. It says nothing about meaning. To check meaning, merge both into a spare worktree and run your tests there.

git worktree add --detach ../combo cursor-214 && cd ../combo
git merge --no-edit my-claude-branch && npm ci && npm test

What gitta adds

gitta treats both tools as one team. It watches every git worktree on your machine, and its GitHub check compares every open agent pull request, including the one from the Cursor background agent, before anyone merges.

gitta init --gate "npm ci && npm test"
gitta status      # local Claude Code worktrees and open agent PRs, side by side

gitta uses no AI model. It parses each changed file with Tree-sitter, finds what each agent changed and what each agent's new code uses, and warns the local agent when a pull request changes something it relies on. On GitHub, the gitta check names which open pull requests touch the same code and whether they pass your tests together. You merge as always, and gitta runs the gate on the combined code and stops a merge to main when the tests fail.

Keep Cursor and Claude Code both. For the worktree side of this, read Claude Code agent teams on one repository. For why worktree isolation is not enough, read Why git worktrees don't prevent agent conflicts.

Questions teams ask