The shadow workspace is an opt-in setting you can configure to improve the quality of AI-generated code. Only some features use it.

Shadow workspace settings.

If you have the shadow workspace enabled, background AIs can ask for lints for the code they write. This spawns a hidden window locally on your computer, to ensure that your coding experience is unaffected.

The shadow workspace will increase the memory usage from Cursor, so we recommend only enabling this feature if you have plenty of RAM.

You can read more about the shadow workspace in our blog post on it.