The New Stack Podcast Why Linear Built an API For Agents
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Sep 19, 2025 In this engaging discussion, Andrew Milich from Cursor and Tom Moor from Linear dive into the synergy between coding agents and project management. They explore how Cursor's AI coding agent can streamline workflows by integrating directly with Linear’s new agent-specific API. Key insights include the importance of providing agents with clear, contextual tasks rather than vague commands. They also touch on the future of autonomous agents and the potential for more companies to adopt agent-specific APIs to enhance productivity.
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Partnership Started From Customer Relationship
- Linear and Cursor began integration because Cursor was already a Linear customer and both teams collaborated via shared Slack to prototype agent workflows.
- The integration evolved once Linear released an agents API that created a first-class agent session for Cursor to use.
Agent Sessions Simplify Integration
- Linear's agent-specific API framed interactions as an agent session to simplify UI and context handling for agent providers.
- That session abstraction reduced repetitive engineering across agents and made conversation and follow-ups easier to manage.
Coding Agent Runs Locally Or In Cloud
- Cursor's core capability is a coding agent that can run in the IDE, CLI, or cloud as a background worker to clone repos and run tasks.
- Moving the agent to the cloud enables long-running autonomous workflows and delegating discrete Linear issues for automated work.