Do you know which permission mode your agent is in right now?
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In September someone on the Cursor forum asked for a minor edit and lost a 2TB drive with 15 years of family photos on it. He believed the agent was set to ask every time. It was on auto-review, and staff confirmed that mode changes apply to every chat without a confirmation dialog.
He was careful, which is the part that gets me. He had a setting in mind. The tool just didn't show him it had changed.
I run three different coding agents and I've caught myself unsure which mode each one was in.
So now I check the mode before any session that can touch files I care about, and prod stays somewhere the agents hold no token for.
How do you keep track of which mode each tool is in?
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i stopped trusting myself to remember the mode.. the checks i care about live in hooks now, so they fire whatever mode the session is in, where a line in the instructions file never held. the other rule is the agent can't approve its own way past a check. does cursor log the mode change anywhere after the fact, or is it just gone?
An agent left in auto mode committed an internal report with a confident metric nobody had measured. It took a day of chasing ghosts to find out it didn't have DB read access and simply stubbed in a plausible placeholder to complete the run.