Instructa Academy

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Hey, welcome to this lesson. I'm going to show you now how to set up background tasks. We have already some tasks started. You can see them here, or you can also hit Command, Shift and P for create new background agent. And you can see that these background agents are already working. But now we are looking how we can use them. To enable background agents, just go to the settings and be sure that under general, data sharing enabled. Either you choose your shared data, so you improve scores of everyone, you share your telemetry data. Or you enable privacy mode with storage. No training code stored for background agent and other feature. If you have enabled privacy mode, you can't use background agent. One of these two options enables you to work with background agent. Okay? And by the way, if you don't see this drop-down there, this is a little bug. You just need to hit Command and minus or Command and plus to resize the view. Or you can also do it here with the zoom options. And then you need to go to background agent. First, obviously you need to enable background agents. Since background agents are tightly integrated with GitHub, you get a separate branch and you also get a PR if you want. That means you absolutely need to connect GitHub to work with background agents. I've already done it, so I have here the manage button, but you can click on it. And by the way, you can also enable background agents in your dashboard under cursor.com/dashboard under background agent. And you can also manage them here. And here, the Slack option, which we do in another lesson. Okay, then it asks to install Cursor in your organizations on GitHub or just on your private, then you need to configure it. I'm going to configure it now in Instructa Pro, and then you can decide if the background agents are allowed to read all repositories in this organization or just selected repositories. I'm going to choose select, and then I'm going to search for the macro app under Instructa Pro, macro calculator, and then I'm going to click installing and authorizing and use passkey. Then I'm going to log in. This is a usual error we get, but most of the time it's still connected. You can just try it again. Let's try it again. Then you can already see it's configured. But let's do a double-check. Then you have here only selected repositories, and you can see that we have access now. This is … I don't know if it's a bug or it can't be solved in this way, but if we do it again, it should work. This is almost all we need to do to set up our background agent. We have some more options here. You can click through it. So first we can also create an environment json if we have some different environments. Uh, this is more advanced stuff here. It's interesting that it tells us that usage-based pricing is required to run background agent because within the Pro plan, it tells us that you get access to background agents. And when you go to the dashboard, to the Cursor dashboard, it's within the Pro limit. So if you use background, it will take requests of your Pro limits and it works until you hit read limits. But it seems that you have to enable here usage-based pricing that it works. Maybe it will change sooner or later, but for now, I've enabled usage-based pricing and it works as expected. Okay, then we have GitHub access, which is verified. This is working. Since we have cloned this data kit from GitHub, so the original one was not Instructa Pro, it was under instructor repositories, and we cloned here this data min. That means if you clone here this repository, then be sure that you change the remote URL. Okay, this is fine. Then base environment, configure tools and runtimes for the agents mesh. Here you can define your own Dockerfile or you can also set up your machine to use a custom Dockerfile. This is again, more advanced stuff, which we won't cover now. And then we have a runtime configuration. This is important because if we use, for example, Bun or, I don't know, Yarn, then we need to configure this here. Or maybe if we want to start a dev server not with npm run dev, for example, just with npm run start, then we need to define this here in the runtime configuration. And we can also add here more default terminal commands. And then we have secrets. If you have already worked with Vercel in deployments, or for example, with OpenAI Codex, you need to add your secrets here. For example, if you work with databases or with some API keys like OpenAI or Anthropic keys, then you need to place here your secrets because the container we have talked about before is isolated from your current workspace. That means it has its own environment variables, its own general, its own environment, and you need to fill everything in, which you have also on your local. The same if you do deployments on Vercel, Netlify or AWS or on Cloudflare; it doesn't matter. You need to add there all your environment variables and secrets. Okay, but since we're working just on a landing page and a simple app, we don't need any secrets for now. This would make sense if we add some AI logic to our macro calculator or if we add some chart, then we could add here the API keys. Okay, that's all for configuration … and now you can run your own background tasks. And to run background tasks, you can start it here on the bottom left. You can start it here with the cloud with Command and E, or with Command Shift and P, background agent. Here create new background agent. That's it for the lesson. In this lesson we have learned how to set up our background agents, and that means we need to be sure that data sharing is enabled. You can configure them on the background agents in settings. Be sure that they are enabled. Connect your GitHub repositories, and check all settings here. If you're doing some advanced stuff, you can define your own environment json file, like here. And if you need more information, then go to the docs under background agent, and you can read through here that they fit to your environment. Thank you and see you in the next lesson

And as always, I'm going to start from a starter kit because I want my foundation to be secured. I want to have everything set up, and then I can work within this project. You can use any project you like. To install this startup project, you can just clone it and change the remote URL if you're more experienced, or you can just fork it, and then clone it to your local. Or I think the easiest way is just scroll down in the docs, and then you can just use this command. And with npx git pick, you just get the repository, and you can name it, and then you can push it into your own new repository. So for example, let's open new terminal, then type in npx git pick, and then you can write here macro calculator app, and it will download this repository. And then just change into this directory, macro calculator app, and then type cursor dot, which will open cursor, and now, you have your app ready, and you can install everything. And now you need to set up your own repository on GitHub. For this, just go to your private. Let's do this, for example, here. And then you just click here on new, write here macro calculator app, make this public, create the repository. And since we have used npx git pick, we don't have any git references now. Just copy-paste here the… or create a new repository on the command line and then open the terminal, and then paste here everything, and hit enter. Or even easier, if you use here the agent, but this takes some requests. I wouldn't recommend it if you know how to work with the terminal. And then hit enter, and it will push it to the repository. We can do this quickly, hit enter, wait for it, and then we can reload. And our macro calculator is not online. And if we want to add all files to our repository, then it's just easier to use the integrated git here with source control. You just need to click here on the icon on the top right, and then just commit it, sync the changes, and now everything… Let me reload it. And now all the code is in your own repository. And this is pretty important because, first, our code is now safe. It's now versioned. And most important for this lesson is that we can use it with background agents. If you're looking for the final version of the macro calculator, then just type here github.com instructor-pro macro calculator. You can find it here in the Instructa Pro repositories. That's it for the download and move on to the next. And now we have opened our project. We have right our project explorer, left our chat, and we are going to install all dependencies. For this, you need to install NodeJS. I'm going to install it with pnpm install, or you can just use npm install. And then we can run pnpm run dev, and our dev server has been started, and everything is now working on our local system. So we have now our web application or website local testable on our PC.

Hey, welcome to the background agent lessons. What we are going to build is a simple macro calculator based on a starter template. So we are building a simple website web application where you can calculate your macros. Let me insert some height and then some weight. And then we can choose here from different options. And it will calculate some macros. And with background agents we are going to build our about page and then our pricing page. This is one of the simplest examples I could think of. And I think it's pretty nice to start with. And also to start working with it. Maybe you want to sell some eBooks or maybe you have a service. And you want to get started with building a micro SaaS and you want to do it really fast. But you don't want to spend hours and hours on learning different technologies or basically putting all together. So I think building a simple little website is a nice starting point and you can do so with modern technologies and advanced frameworks but also with very simple inputs. Now with a bit of background agents we can guide you through creating this web application. And we can also still cover the points if you ever want to scale or ever want to employ some paid traffic. On top of it we want flexibility and a clean design. We want to avoid paying extra monthly costs. And we want to start small. So if later on we want to extend our website with additional pages or with other solicitations. For example like giving people the possibility to download something or maybe adding your blog. Then we can do that quite quickly. So here I think it's use cases like creating a landing page or a newsletter sign up for your newsletter. Or maybe a pricing matrix where you show different tiers of pricing. And you can always extend it later on. For instance you can also add some eCommerce. So if you want to sell maybe like a 5 euro eBook then you could add a simple payment link. With Stripe it's really easy and then you can sell it. So you can do everything really simple to start with and you can still have the possibility to scale it later on. And then also choosing maybe a different pricing plan or a different builder. And then of course with no code tools you can further extend and choose multiple pricing plans or multiple tiers. You can also choose a very specific niche software like a specialized low code builder. If you want to be really fast and just start with one thing. For example for a recipe site or for a video store you could pick a specific stack and they already solve a lot of problems for you. But then if you want to do everything on your own or if you want to scale then you might be locked into their pricing. And that might cost you extra. So the advantage of a simple approach is that you can just do everything yourself while having these building blocks basically scaffold out the base and then you can customize everything on top of it.

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Hey, welcome back. Let's talk about cursor pricing since it's pretty important to know that you choose the right plan for your projects. And we have three different pricing plans. One was announced just today. It's the June 70, 2025 and it's the new ultra plan. But first start with the free plan. Within the free plan you get a pro two-week trial. That means you can try cursor for two weeks in the pro plan, but you limit it with your requests and also with the top completions. That means the free plan is just for trying out cursor. You hit the limits very fast. So at least the pro plan needs to be considered. But there is one important thing I want to mention. You get here two-week pro trial, but you have also a special offer. So just go to your hub and then you can find your special offers. And on this page, you can choose here, get my code. This gives you one month cursor for free. It only works for new accounts. So if you have already an existing account, then this doesn't work, unfortunately. But if you're new to cursor, then I would recommend signing up right now, and then you get one month pro for free. So after this month—or if you miss that special offer—you will be charged $20 per month plus taxes. And for that, you get 2,000 requests per month and 1,000 top-K completions. You can try out agents, but background agents are not included in the pro plan. You can’t customize your models, so you’re locked to the default models. And that’s why the ultra plan was announced. With ultra, you get 50,000 requests per month and 25,000 top-K completions. You can run background agents, and you get access to model customization, including max context size up to 256 k tokens. Ultra costs $99 per month plus taxes. If you exceed the limits in either plan, you’ll keep working but pay overages at the rates listed on the pricing page. Both paid plans come with 30-day version history, priority support, and unlimited private repositories. Finally, there’s an enterprise option—Cursor for your own company. That gives you SSO, custom billing, advanced security, and dedicated support. Pricing is negotiated; you need to contact sales. If you want to read through all the details or share them with Finance, open the “How Cursor Pricing Works” doc in the hub. If you have any questions, I’m here. Let’s move on to the next lesson.