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Pulse is Mains’ scheduled agent runner. You pick a workspace, write a prompt (or start from a template), set a frequency, and Mains runs the agent at the scheduled time — analyzing the repo, drafting reports, or kicking off recurring chores while you’re not watching. Pulse is time-based. For event-based work (sync on push, react to a webhook), use Automations instead.

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Pulse vs. Automations

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Building a Pulse

1

Open Pulse

Click Pulse in the sidebar. The page lists your existing pulses and a button to create a new one.
2

Pick a starting point

Choose a template or click Blank to write your own prompt from scratch. Templates pre-fill the title, prompt, frequency, and time — you can change any of them.
3

Configure

Set a workspace, provider, model, schedule, and (optionally) thinking mode and effort level. See the fields below.
4

Activate

Toggle the pulse on. Mains computes the next run time and queues it. You’ll see runs appear in the workspace history exactly like manual runs.

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Schedule Options

Mains tracks nextRunAt per pulse and atomically claims the slot when the time arrives, so a pulse never double-fires even if the app restarts mid-tick.

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Run Options

Pulse always forces Cursor’s mode to agent regardless of the workspace default — a scheduled run cannot block on a confirmation dialog.

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Templates

Mains ships 16 ready-made templates in 4 categories. Each one is a real prompt designed to work without human supervision — they lean on git history, repo state, and lockfiles rather than asking the agent to make calls it can’t verify. Each template carries a default frequency and time — the standup digest defaults to weekdays at 09:00, the weekly engineering update to Friday at 17:00, and so on.

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Run History

Every pulse run shows up in the workspace’s run list, tagged with the pulse that produced it. From the Pulse page you can see:
  • Last run — timestamp + status of the most recent execution
  • Last error — captured if the run failed (e.g. provider unavailable, sandbox denied)
  • Next run — the upcoming nextRunAt so you know exactly when it’ll fire

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When to Use Pulse

Reach for Pulse when the answer is always the same kind of report and you don’t want to ask for it. Standups, weekly engineering updates, dependency audits, “is anything on fire?” briefs — those benefit hugely from a fixed cadence. Don’t use Pulse for one-off questions or for things that need fresh context every time — a manual run with a focused prompt is faster.