If you've ever context-switched between a Jira ticket, a spec doc, and your editor just to answer "wait, what am I actually supposed to build here?" — you know the tax it puts on real work. Today that tax gets a lot smaller: the Intent plugin for Cursor is live, bringing changesets, specs, and verification directly into your agent's chat, without ever leaving the IDE.
What it actually does
The plugin connects Cursor to Intent over MCP and wraps the connection in workflows engineers already reach for dozens of times a day:
/intent-start— pick up an in-progress changeset, check out the rightintent/<id>-<slug>branch, read the linked specs, and get an implementation outline before writing a line of code./intent-status— a fast "where am I?" dashboard: todo progress, linked PRs, local branch state./intent-verify— a real completeness audit. The agent checks your code against acceptance criteria, testing notes, and specs, and comes back with a Met / Partial / Missing / Untestable checklist and a merge-readiness verdict./intent-refine— when implementation reasonably diverged from the original spec, this drafts the deviations and (with your confirmation) syncs Intent to match reality.
Underneath the commands are rules and skills — always-on conventions like branch naming and "never edit .intent/ locally," plus detailed workflows the agent follows so behavior stays consistent across a team, not just across your own sessions.
Why verify and refine are two different questions
It's tempting to treat "check my work" as one button. Intent splits it deliberately, because they answer different questions:
- Verify asks is the work done? — the spec is the judge. You get a structured checklist and a verdict.
- Refine asks does the spec still describe what I built? — code is the judge, and only real deviations get sent upstream.
That distinction matters because the failure modes are different. A gap found by /intent-verify might mean you have more coding to do — or it might mean the spec itself was wrong and should catch up. Running /intent-refine on the right subset (/intent-refine only acceptance criteria, for instance) keeps that correction targeted instead of rewriting a whole spec because one detail moved.
Closing the loop, without leaving the editor
This plugin isn't a new source of truth — it's a bridge to the one you already have. Intent still owns changesets and specs; repos still sync .intent/ content on a regular interval; PRs still merge the normal way. What changes is friction. The agent reading your code now has the same context a human reviewer would ask for — acceptance criteria, prior decisions, related todos — and can act on it: checking out the right branch, flagging gaps, drafting spec updates for your review.
Try it
If your team is already on Intent, this is the fastest way to feel the difference between "documentation somewhere else" and documentation that travels with the code. Grab an API token from Settings, enable the plugin and its MCP server in Cursor's Customize panel, and run /intent-start on your next changeset.
Specs that stay attached to the work. An agent that knows what "done" means before you ask it. That's the whole idea — now it's one keystroke away.