List all stakeholders who need to approve this PRD before work begins:
GTM Information: [Link to PR/FAQ or GTM doc if applicable]
Many IDEs today — VS Code and other forked versions like Cursor/Windsurf, JetBrains, Zed — are quickly trying to capitalize on the larger market around background agentic work. They’re all building in capabilities that facilitate farming out well-defined operations out to a background/cloud agent running on some remote compute. This capability, however, cannot easily be utilized by larger enterprises which generally:
Coder Tasks, in the current state, can solve some of this pain. Tasks run in secure and auditable workspaces. Those workspaces have access to the necessary context so that an agent can be productive. The missing link, however, is that Tasks must be run via our UI or the API/CLI. This is not in the IDE where engineers are actively working. Additionally, our experience is more clunky given how we’ve optimized the experience to be Coder-centric.
By bringing the Tasks capabilities to the IDE, we can quickly bring the background jobs value to enterprises while keeping the experience secure and productive. By focusing on VS Code based IDEs first, we can quickly capture a large share of the market including Cursor which is leading in background agent use.
Define WHAT we need to build. Use user stories, functional requirements, or both — whatever is clearest. By approval, everything listed here is required.
User Stories
Phase 1