Cursor Now Lets You Extend Its AI Agent With One-Click Marketplace Plugins

Key Takeaways

• Cursor 2.5, released February 17, 2026, introduces a plugin marketplace bundling MCP servers, skills, subagents, hooks, and rules into single installs
• Launch partners include Amplitude, AWS, Figma, Linear, Stripe, Cloudflare, Vercel, Databricks, Snowflake, and Hex spanning design, payments, infrastructure, and analytics
• Developers install plugins directly inside the editor with /add-plugin or by browsing cursor.com/marketplace
• Async subagents now run with lower latency, can spawn sub-subagents, and execute in parallel enabling multi-file features, large refactors, and complex bug fixes

Cursor just collapsed the entire product development lifecycle into a single editor and the mechanism is a new plugin architecture that ships with Cursor 2.5. Released February 17, 2026, the update adds an official marketplace where developers install plugins connecting Figma designs, Stripe payments, AWS infrastructure, and production analytics without switching tools. This article breaks down exactly how the plugin system works, what each launch partner’s integration delivers, and what the new sandbox and async subagent capabilities change for development teams.

What the Cursor Marketplace Is

The Cursor Marketplace is a curated distribution platform for plugins that extend Cursor’s AI agent with external tools and domain-specific knowledge. Each plugin is a bundled package not a loose script that combines one or more of five distinct primitives: MCP servers, skills, subagents, hooks, and rules. This single-install packaging means one plugin can simultaneously connect Cursor to an external API, enforce coding standards, and enable parallel task execution.

What is the Cursor Marketplace?
The Cursor Marketplace is the official plugin distribution platform for Cursor, the AI code editor developed by Anysphere, Inc. Launched February 17, 2026 alongside Cursor 2.5, it allows developers to install prebuilt plugins bundles of MCP servers, skills, subagents, hooks, and rules to extend agent capabilities. Browse at cursor.com/marketplace or install via /add-plugin in the editor.

Cursor launched the marketplace with a deliberately curated set of verified partners rather than an open submission directory. The initial partners Amplitude, AWS, Figma, Linear, Stripe, Cloudflare, Vercel, Databricks, Snowflake, and Hex were selected to cover the full product development lifecycle from planning through deployment and analytics.

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The Five Plugin Primitives

Understanding what a Cursor plugin contains is more useful than knowing which logos appear in the marketplace. Each plugin can bundle any combination of these five components:

• Skills – domain-specific prompts and code that agents can discover and run automatically
• Subagents – specialized agents that allow Cursor to complete tasks in parallel
• MCP servers – services that connect Cursor to external tools or data sources via the Model Context Protocol
• Hooks – custom scripts that let developers observe and control agent behavior at specific execution points
• Rules – system-level instructions that enforce coding standards and preferences across all sessions

What is an MCP server in Cursor?
An MCP (Model Context Protocol) server is a service that connects Cursor’s AI agent to external tools, APIs, or data sources. As part of Cursor’s plugin primitive architecture documented in the official Cursor 2.5 release, February 2026 MCP servers enable the agent to query databases, access design files, call payment APIs, and deploy cloud infrastructure from within the code editor.

Plugins Across the Full Dev Lifecycle

The ten launch partners map onto four distinct development workflow stages:

Three engineers from launch partners confirmed production-level impact in their own words. Gus Nguyen, Senior Software Engineer at Stripe, stated: “The Stripe plugin lets Cursor understand how Stripe integrations should be built. It created the products, prices, and payment link using Stripe’s APIs, then shipped a working app almost immediately. It’s a much faster way to build and test Stripe integrations.”

Elliot Dauber, Software Engineer at Vercel, noted: “Cursor now knows our React best practices and can deploy to preview or production directly from the editor.”

Frank Lee, Principal Product Manager at Amplitude, added: “With the Amplitude plugin, Cursor can pull in rich behavioral context, analyze growth dashboards, synthesize customer feedback, and turn those insights into concrete recommendations. I can even have Cursor draft a PR immediately.”

How does the Cursor Stripe plugin work?
The Cursor Stripe plugin teaches the agent how Stripe integrations should be structured. It connects to Stripe’s APIs, creates products, prices, and payment links, and ships working payment flows from within the editor. Confirmed by Gus Nguyen, Senior Software Engineer at Stripe, in the official Cursor 2.5 release documentation, February 2026.

Building and Publishing Your Own Plugin

The Cursor Marketplace accepts community submissions developers can build custom plugins and publish them at cursor.com/marketplace/publish. Cursor itself has published an example set called the Cursor Team Kit, which contains the team’s own internal workflows for CI, code review, and testing, available for any developer to install.

Can I build my own Cursor plugin?
Developers can build and publish custom Cursor plugins by combining skills, subagents, MCP servers, hooks, and rules into a single package. Submissions are accepted at cursor.com/marketplace/publish. The Cursor Team Kit containing Cursor’s own CI, code review, and testing workflows is publicly available as a reference, per the official February 2026 launch post.

Installing any plugin requires either browsing cursor.com/marketplace or typing /add-plugin directly in the Cursor editor. No external configuration file editing is required for standard plugin installs the bundled structure handles setup automatically.

Sandbox Access Controls

Cursor 2.5 adds granular network and filesystem access controls to the sandbox environment. Developers can now define exactly which domains the agent is allowed to reach while running sandboxed commands, with three distinct modes:

• User config only – restricted to domains defined in your sandbox.json
• User config with defaults – restricted to your allowlist plus Cursor’s built-in defaults
• Allow all – unrestricted network access within the sandbox

The sandbox also supports access controls for local filesystem directories and files, not just network domains. Admins on the Enterprise plan can enforce network allowlists and denylists organization-wide from the admin dashboard, ensuring egress policies apply uniformly to all agent sandbox sessions.

What are Cursor sandbox access controls?
Cursor 2.5 sandbox access controls let developers define which external domains and local filesystem paths the AI agent can access during sandboxed command execution. Three modes are available: user config only, user config with defaults, or allow all. Enterprise admins can enforce allowlists and denylists organization-wide from the Cursor admin dashboard, per the February 2026 changelog.

Async Subagents

Cursor 2.5 changes how subagents execute. Previously, all subagents ran synchronously the parent agent would block until each subagent completed before continuing. Subagents now run asynchronously, allowing the parent agent to continue working while subagents execute in the background.

Subagents can also spawn their own subagents, creating a tree of coordinated parallel work. This architecture allows Cursor to handle larger tasks: multi-file feature builds, large-scale refactors, and challenging bugs that previously required sequential execution. Performance improvements in this release also deliver lower latency, better streaming feedback, and more responsive parallel execution compared to the previous version.

What are Cursor async subagents?
Cursor async subagents are specialized AI agents that run in the background while the parent agent continues working. Introduced in Cursor 2.5, February 2026, subagents now run asynchronously, can spawn their own sub-subagents, and execute with lower latency and better streaming feedback. This enables multi-file features, large refactors, and complex bug resolution to run as coordinated parallel workstreams.

What’s Coming Next

Cursor has confirmed that private team marketplaces are in active development. These will allow organizations to share plugins internally with central governance and security controls. No release date has been announced as of February 18, 2026.

Limitations and Considerations

This article is based entirely on official Cursor documentation published February 17, 2026 at cursor.com/blog/marketplace and cursor.com/changelog/2-5. The total number of community-submitted plugins is not publicly disclosed. Private team marketplace availability and pricing remain unconfirmed. Cursor subscription pricing is not referenced in this article to verify current tier pricing directly at cursor.com/pricing. No affiliate relationships apply to this coverage.

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