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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Always Review Agent Work
- Treat background agents like teammates: review their output and iterate rather than expecting perfect end-to-end automation.
- Keep engineers involved to run locally or open the IDE for final validation and testing.
Build Agent-Centric Interfaces
- Design UIs that feel like messaging a teammate but add agent-specific controls like forking conversations and structured responses.
- Surface primitives for account linking and repo selection to reduce integration complexity for agent providers.
Agent Primitives Reduce Repetition
- Using the full GraphQL API worked but exposed repetitive patterns, so Linear created agent primitives to handle common agent actions and comment threading.
- Agents now post updates tied to an agent session ID which abstracts UI concerns and simplifies lifecycle management.