How Basis builds long-horizon accounting agents with Cursor

Basis develops AI agents for accounting teams that perform complex, long-running tasks such as month-end close, tax returns, and audit work, producing outputs intended for professional review. Because these workflows involve hundreds of interdependent decisions and are difficult to assess solely by final outcomes, the company treats agent context—including prompts, tools, instructions, skills, and examples—as a production-critical input that must be carefully inspected and revised. Basis uses behavior specifications, written as Markdown documents separate from agent prompts, to define observable standards for recurring agent behaviors and enable judges to assess recorded work trajectories as true, false, or not applicable. Engineers use Cursor to write and refine both these specifications and the runtime context, while Braintrust evaluates whether agents followed the specified behaviors in production; identified failures then guide updates to tools, prompts, or execution frameworks. Basis reports that its agents can complete a Form 1065 partnership return in roughly six to seven hours compared with an estimated 30 to 40 hours of human work, and it has released its behavior-specification approach with Braintrust as an open standard for evaluating agent processes.

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