Error messages

Planning next moves

Planning next moves

After you send a message, Cursor's agent shows a short animated status while it gets going:

Planning next moves

Normally it flashes past and the reply starts. When it's stuck, the line keeps animating and nothing else happens, with no error. The forum megathread on it reached 394 posts and 24,210 views before Cursor closed it in February 2026, and 10 new topics with the phrase in the title were opened in August and September.

What it means when it hangs

The status itself doesn't carry a reason. A Cursor engineer wrote in December 2025 that there are "a few reasons why" it might stall, and when staff closed the megathread they called it "a catch-all for an issue caused by many different circumstances". What they've said about the current cases is more useful.

On September 24, 2026 a Cursor support engineer wrote: "The agent gets stuck before the request is even sent, so it just sits on 'Planning next moves'." So the model isn't thinking hard. Nothing has been asked of it yet. That's also why Network Diagnostics pass for most people who hit it, and why HTTP settings "only help briefly", in staff's words.

Windows, Cursor 3.21

Staff call this "a known issue on Windows with the 3.21 updates" and said on September 24 that a fix is coming in an upcoming release. Until then:

• Close all open editor tabs and send the message again.
• Run Developer: Restart Extension Host from the command palette (Ctrl+Shift+P). Staff said it clears faster than a full restart. The extension host is the background process that runs Cursor's agent requests on your machine.
• Fully quit and reopen Cursor. Logging out and back in works too, because it gives you the same fresh start.
• Keep to one agent chat, with fewer attached files per turn. It's "much worse with several attached files or two Agent chats open at once".

If it's blocking your work, staff said on September 21 that the previous stable build, 3.20.21, doesn't have this bug.

macOS 27 and an Intel-only git

After upgrading to macOS 27, some Macs hang on the same line and then time out. Cursor traced it to an Intel-only git sitting first on your PATH, because macOS 27 doesn't carry Rosetta (Apple's Intel translation layer) over from the old install. On September 25 staff said a fix has landed for an upcoming version. Before then, rename or remove the Intel git in /usr/local/bin, or reinstall Rosetta and restart Cursor:

softwareupdate --install-rosetta --agree-to-license

Setting git.path in settings fixes the Source Control view, and it doesn't fix the agent (staff checked).

Older causes that still turn up

From the 2025 megathread, staff pointed at a few other culprits. Extensions were one: start with cursor --disable-extensions and add them back one at a time (Nx Console was the cause "for many"). A proxy that buffers streaming was "a common cause of Planning hangs", which Cursor's network docs cover: set HTTP Compatibility Mode to HTTP/1.1, or test on a phone hotspot. On a remote server, check that it can resolve api2.cursor.sh, because one VPS couldn't. And MCP servers are worth switching off while you test.