Cursor publishes hard numbers on multi-agent economics: expensive planners, cheap workers

In a July 20, 2026 engineering post, Cursor reports that a hierarchical agent swarm — a frontier model planning while cheaper models execute — passed 100% of tests on its build-a-database benchmark while cutting generated code volume by roughly 86%, where its earlier flat swarm spiraled. Run costs ranged from about $1,300 to $10,600 depending on the model mix, with worker models consuming 69–90% of tokens at a fraction of the cost. The figures are Cursor’s own benchmark, not independently replicated.

What it means The most concrete public data yet for budgeting planner/worker model tiers in multi-agent pipelines.