[HN Gopher] Composer: Building a fast frontier model with RL
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Composer: Building a fast frontier model with RL
Author : leerob
Score : 157 points
Date : 2025-10-29 16:04 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (cursor.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (cursor.com)
| ibash wrote:
| Very cool, congrats!
| romanovcode wrote:
| Where is the comparison with Sonnet 4.5? That would be the only
| thing that matters, really.
| matheist wrote:
| > _" Best Frontier" includes GPT-5 and Sonnet 4.5, which both
| outperform Composer._
| yodon wrote:
| >> "Best Frontier" includes GPT-5 and Sonnet 4.5, which both
| outperform Composer.
|
| Looking at the graph, it would appear there's an implicit
| "today" in that statement, as they do appear poised to equal
| or surpass Sonnet 4.5 on that same benchmark in the near
| future.
| timcobb wrote:
| Does anyone code with GPT-5? I've never had it work in
| Cursor. I mean, like, at all.
| srush wrote:
| A lot of people use it! It scores very well on our
| benchmarks, significantly better than Composer-1.
| alyxya wrote:
| I wonder if this custom model is trained on cursor users. There's
| a lot of potential on how much better a custom model could be the
| closer it is integrated with the product. Having the model learn
| to adapt to different user preferences would make it stand out
| compared to memoryless frontier models.
| Sammi wrote:
| The fact that you are wondering this is bad. You definitely
| should know this. _ALL_ the online ai providers are training on
| your data. They have more expensive enterprise plans if want to
| opt out.
| alyxya wrote:
| I've generally seen providers allow you to opt in or out.
| What may vary is what the default is and what they may offer
| in exchange for using your data (perhaps they could offer
| higher rate limits).
| nu11ptr wrote:
| I love Cursor. I've tried Copilot/Claude/etc. but keep coming
| back to Cursor. I just want to work, and Cursor tab complete is
| dang accurate, esp. for refactoring tasks.
| Sammi wrote:
| I tried going back to VS Code + Copilot a month ago. I only
| lasted 4 days because it was to bad. It was super slow and gave
| poor suggestions, but mostly it just flat out did not suggest
| anything. Cursor feels snappy in comparison and the suggestions
| are more often than not useful. The most annoying thing about
| Cursor tab complete, is that it is so fast that when I am doing
| something unusual then it will keep on jumping in with useless
| suggestions. They have a snooze function for this though.
| WanderPanda wrote:
| Damn TIL, I always used > Cursor: disable completions and
| forgot to turn it on again I need to try snooze then!
| stared wrote:
| While I am excited to see a new model, I am skeptical when there
| is so much vagueness - charts with "frontier models" without
| actually spelling out which ones, charts with no numbers (time
| axis, or in one chart - entirely).
| srush wrote:
| There is a footnote that should help with the models. Training
| is a harder thing to report on, but roughly our finding here is
| that RL scales.
| solarkraft wrote:
| People on here love to be contrarian about Cursor, but I've tried
| all the popular alternatives (Copilot, Claude Code, Codex, Gemini
| CLI, Cline) and found Cursor's overall experience to just be
| unmatched. A big part of that is its speed, another its
| reliability.
|
| It's the only coding agent I'm actually really motivated to use
| out of the box because it really does make me feel more
| productive while the others keep messing up the project, from way
| too large changes I didn't ask for all the way to constant syntax
| and request errors.
|
| It's the only coding agent I've used that feels serious about
| being a product rather than a prototype. Their effort in
| improving their stack is totally paying off.
| pqdbr wrote:
| I dropped cursor for the precise reason you mention:
| reliability.
|
| Countless times my requests in the AI chat just hang there for
| 30+ seconds more until I can retry them.
|
| When I decided to give Claude Code a try (I thought I didn't
| need it because I used Claude in Cursor) I couldn't believe how
| faster it was, and literally 100% reliable.
|
| EDIT: given today's release, decided to give it a go. The
| Composer1 model _is_ fast, but right at the second new agent I
| started I got this:
|
| > Connection failed. If the problem persists, please check your
| internet connection or VPN
| davidgomes wrote:
| A lot of progress is being made here on the Cursor side I
| encourage you to try it again.
|
| (Cursor dev)
| cleak wrote:
| This is the exact reason I left Cursor for Claude Code. Night
| and day difference in reliability. The Windows experience
| might be especially bad, but it would get constantly hung or
| otherwise fail when trying to run commands. I also had to
| babysit Cursor and tell it to continue for mid sized tasks.
| jonasnelle wrote:
| They've improved performance dramatically in the last few
| weeks, might have fixed your issues.
| hobs wrote:
| Its clear they've been shipping a lot of windows updates.
| chasebank wrote:
| I use cursor daily, my business partner uses CC. Without a
| doubt, CC is certainly better, I'm just not willing to let go
| of the flow I spent the last year fine tuning. I'll probably
| make the leap after we finish the latest release.
| infecto wrote:
| Sounds like you have a network problem. Did you try checking
| the network diagnostic in settings? They default to http2
| which can throw a wrench in some corporate networks.
|
| I would be willing to bet money your issue is on your side. I
| am a daily user since the beginning and cannot recall when I
| have had issues like you describe unless it was related to my
| corp network.
| ramon156 wrote:
| You tried Claude and still prefer cursor?
| solarkraft wrote:
| Absolutely. CC _can_ be tuned to not do too much crap on its
| own, but even with the new extension its IDE integration and
| multi thread management are still significantly worse, as is
| its status reporting, which I find to be very important.
|
| Also, somehow magically, I've found Cursor's Auto mode to be
| significantly faster than the specific models I've tried,
| Claude being among them.
| infecto wrote:
| Auto is pretty amazing and I think most folks that have
| issues or complain about cost are simply not using Auto.
| enraged_camel wrote:
| Auto is only good for trivial stuff at this point. It is
| quite subpar at everything else. Th is is probably
| because it almost always defaults to Claude Sonnet 3.5
| (which you can tell if you ask the agent to identify
| itself and tell you its version), and that is pretty
| outdated.
| infecto wrote:
| Again it goes back to what your workflow is. I don't
| think trivial is the right word. I use auto to write
| fairly advanced code but I do it in bite size chunks or
| relatively bite size. So thinking function level or a
| couple of interdependent functions ruins being written.
|
| I would agree it is not as good on doing lengthy work
| where it's taking design all the way through implementing
| a feature in a single shot but trivial is not a good
| description.
|
| I also don't think you're right. 3.5 was recently
| deprecated and even before then, Cursor has been hitting
| rate limits with Anthropic. Auto is as much a token cost
| optimization as it is a rate limit optimization.
| lubujackson wrote:
| Auto had a big improvement a few weeks ago (around when
| pricing changed)
| infecto wrote:
| If a few weeks is months I would agree I think the change
| to Auto was 2-3+ months ago when they moved to charging
| named models and higher limits on Auto.
| infecto wrote:
| Absolutely. I actually don't understand the preference folks
| have for Claude code. I don't find it that powerful. That
| said, I think some of it comes down to preference and work
| context.
| psygn89 wrote:
| Yep, it just works seamlessly. Sure, it hangs sometimes, but
| their UI allows you to retry or undo changes to an earlier
| point in the conversation easily. The autocompletion is nice as
| well and pretty satisfying to tab through the small and menial
| things when refactoring.
| rtfeldman wrote:
| > I've tried all the popular alternatives (Copilot, Claude
| Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, Cline)
|
| Can't help but notice you haven't tried Zed!
| infecto wrote:
| I too have tried them all and have settled with Cursor being
| the best. That said I see the current space split between folks
| like me who know generally what I want built and appreciate a
| tool that helps me get to goal quicker and on the otherwise of
| the spectrum, folks who want the tool to orchestrate most of
| the engineering. I have no opinion on which is better but for
| me I sit on the first camp. In that camp Cursor is by far the
| best tool.
| jasonjmcghee wrote:
| Maybe I'm an outlier but Sonnet 4.5 quality is about as low as
| I'm willing to go.
|
| It's generation speed is not the problem or the time sink.
|
| It's wrestling with it to get the right output.
|
| ---
|
| And just to clarify as maybe I misunderstood again but people are
| comparing cursor to Claude Code and codex etc here- isn't this
| whole article all cursor just using different models?
| srush wrote:
| Agree that Sonnet 4.5 is an excellent model. Would be curious
| to hear your experience using Composer though, it's quite good.
| jasonjmcghee wrote:
| I'll try it out! I haven't yet - just generally conveying my
| opinion that I personally weigh "better model" much more
| important than speed, assuming some "fast enough"
|
| Also, didn't realize you worked at Cursor - I'm a fan of your
| work - they're lucky to have you!
| srush wrote:
| Thanks! Yeah, been working here for 9 months now.
| Fascinated byt agentic coding both as a researcher and
| user.
|
| Totally agree that "smart model" is the table stakes for
| usefulness these days.
| swyx wrote:
| > Sonnet 4.5 quality is about as low as I'm willing to go.
|
| literally a 30 day old model and you've moved the "low"
| goalpost all the way there haha. funny how humans work
| vidarh wrote:
| Yes? Because why should we settle for less now that it is
| available?
| swyx wrote:
| because engineering is the art of "good enough" and
| composer is clearly "good enough but a lot faster" which
| makes up for intelligence gaps in interesting ways
| vidarh wrote:
| It's not good enough for a lot of us, though, clearly.
| jasonjmcghee wrote:
| Yup - just like sibling comment said - my "low bar" is going
| to be whatever the best model is that isn't unreasonably
| costly/expensive.
|
| Speed of model just isn't the bottleneck for me.
|
| Before it I used Opus 4.1, and before that Opus 4.0 and
| before that Sonnet 4.0 - which each have been getting
| slightly better. It's not like Sonnet 4.5 is some crazy step
| function improvement (but the speed over Opus is definitely
| nice)
| solarkraft wrote:
| The reason I pulled out the comparison is to highlight how
| serious they are about all the important parts that make or
| break the AI coding experience - speed being very important to
| me. I'd rather catch my model doing the wrong thing quickly
| than having a higher chance of one-shotting it at the cost of
| having to do a lot of specification upfront.
| alyxya wrote:
| There's two different kinds of users, on one side people are
| more hands off and want the model to autonomously handle longer
| tasks on its own with minimal guidance, and on the other side
| is users who want to interactively collaborate with the model
| to produce desired results. Speed matters much more for the
| second case, where you know what you want and just want the
| model to implement whatever you had in mind as quick as
| possible. Intelligence/ability matters more for the first case
| when you don't have full understanding of all the code. I think
| it's context dependent for me where more serious work tends to
| be more interactive. The intelligence of a model doesn't make
| up for issues due to lack of context to me.
| jasonjmcghee wrote:
| I'm very solidly in the second group - but I review all the
| code. If it writes faster than I can read, that's fast
| enough.
| timcobb wrote:
| Same... I've found that using a non-Claude model just ends up
| being more expensive and not worth it. "Auto" tokens are hardly
| free, and I've had plenty of experiences putting "Auto" to work
| on a "simple" seeming task to have it consume like 1 USD of
| tokens quite quickly while producing nothing of value, when I'd
| replay with Claude 4.5 Sonnet non-thinking and it would provide
| a solid solution for 0.5 USD.
| NaomiLehman wrote:
| gpt-5-high is as low as i can go :]
| jonasnelle wrote:
| Cursor has the best Tab model, and I feel like their lead there
| has kept growing - they're doing some really cool things there.
| https://cursor.com/blog/tab-rl
|
| I wonder how much the methods/systems/data transfer, if they can
| pull off the same with their agentic coding model that would be
| exciting.
| srush wrote:
| We also are big Tab users here at Cursor. In the blog we talk
| about the motivation for this project came from thinking about
| a Tab-like agent.
| dagss wrote:
| It's great. BUT: Wish they had selected another shortcut like
| shift+tab.
|
| Every time I write code myself I find myself racing the AI to
| get an indentation in before the AI is done... gets annoying
| RosalieCodes wrote:
| You can change the key bind, I personally set it to ctrl+tab
| vidarh wrote:
| I feel like that's like having a lead in producing better buggy
| whips.
|
| I run Claude Code in the background near constantly for a
| variety of projects, with --dangerously-skip-permissions, and
| review progress periodically. Tabbing is only relevant when
| it's _totally failing to make progress_ and I have to manually
| intervene, and that to me is a failure scenario that is
| happening less and less often.
| lubujackson wrote:
| This is just a completely different use of LLMs and has
| little to do with working at a real business with a live site
| and users. Cursor is great when you want to gain
| understanding of an issue quickly, or resolve something clear
| and specific quickly.
|
| I'm not against YOLO vibe coding, but being against tab
| completion is just insane to me. At the end of the day, LLMs
| help you achieve goals quicker. You still need to know what
| goal you want to achieve, and tab completion basically let's
| me complete a focused goal nearly as soon as I determine what
| my goal is.
| vidarh wrote:
| Some of these projects are at a "real business with a live
| site and users". Two of the current ones are.
|
| And it's not remotely "YOLO vibe coding". All the code gets
| reviewed, and tested thoroughly, and they are worked to
| specs, and gated by test suites.
|
| What I don't do is babysit the LLM until it's code passes
| both the test suite _and_ automated review stages, because
| it 's a waste of time.
|
| Others of these projects are research tasks. While I wrote
| this comment, Claude unilaterally fixed a number of bugs in
| a compiler.
| camdenreslink wrote:
| What are you building with this workflow? Is it an
| application live in production with users? It is such a
| foreign way of working to me.
| vidarh wrote:
| A compiler (hobby project). A web application server
| (tooling for my consultancy). An agentic framework to part-
| automate end-to-end development of a large web app
| (customer project). An analytics platform to analyze
| infrastructure maturity (customer project).
|
| Usually I'll have several Claude Code sessions running in
| parallel on different projects, and when one of them stops
| I will review the code for that project and start it again
| - either moving forwards or re-doing things that have
| issues.
| enraged_camel wrote:
| Tab model is fantastic but I wish it was somehow aware of the
| conversation happening in the currently active AI chat session.
| kilroy123 wrote:
| What I can't stand about cursor is the constantly changing and
| confusing billing and usage.
|
| I think competition in the space is a good thing, but I'm very
| skeptical their model will outperform Claude.
| srush wrote:
| Hi everyone,
|
| I am an ML researcher at Cursor, and worked on this project.
| Would love to hear any feedback you may have on the model, and
| can answer question about the blog post.
| alyxya wrote:
| Is the new model trained from scratch? What training data went
| into it?
| dfltr wrote:
| Is it true that Cheetah is Grok Code Fast 2? Does this mean
| that the new Cursor model is also based on Grok?
| srush wrote:
| Cheetah was an earlier (and dumber) version of this model
| that we used to test production speed. They are both
| developed in-house. If you liked Cheetah, give this model a
| try.
| dfltr wrote:
| Awesome, thanks for the clarification. So are the rumors
| around Cheetah being based on a Grok model just straight up
| untrue? I want to try Composer but have a pretty strict no
| X/Grok policy.
| srush wrote:
| Straight up untrue.
| carlosbaraza wrote:
| This is nice. I liked Cheetah for grunt work that I want to
| get out quickly and is not too hard. The speed is really
| awesome. A model that would run at even higher speeds like
| the OSS models at groq/cerebras would really be workflow
| changing, because the slowness of SOTA models really breaks
| the flow. I find myself taking a ton of breaks and getting
| distracted while I wait for a model to complete a task
| (e.g. just now).
| srush wrote:
| Let us know how you like it.
| WanderPanda wrote:
| Why did you stop training shy of the frontier models? From the
| log plot it seems like you would only need ~50% more compute to
| reach frontier capability
| srush wrote:
| We did a lot of internal testing and thought this model was
| already quite useful for release.
| WanderPanda wrote:
| Makes sense! I like that you guys are more open about it.
| The other labs just drop stuff from the ivory tower. I
| think your style matches better with engineers who are used
| to datasheets etc. and usually don't like poking a black
| box
| srush wrote:
| Thanks! I do like the labs blog posts as well though,
| OpenAI and Anthropic have some classics.
| pdeva1 wrote:
| is Composer a fine tune of an existing open source base model?
| srush wrote:
| Our primary focus is on RL post-training. We think that is
| the best way to get the model to be a strong interactive
| agent.
| comex wrote:
| So, yes, but you won't say what the base model is? :)
| chaidhat wrote:
| Which model did you distill it from? Great work! PS getting a
| few scenarios where it doesn't follow rules as well as sonnet
| 4.5
| srush wrote:
| The blog talks about the training process. Specifically we
| trained with RL post-training on coding examples.
| chis wrote:
| Makes sense, but what model was used for the base? Is it
| some open-source model, and you're not at liberty to
| disclose?
| chaidhat wrote:
| that's cool thanks!
| MysticFear wrote:
| There is a youtube livestreamer building with it now, if you
| are looking for direct feedback:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bDPMVq69ac
| srush wrote:
| neat!
| carlosbaraza wrote:
| How do you work with multiple agents?
| srush wrote:
| We train with a single agent. is that the question?
| az226 wrote:
| How many times have you needed to reset the optimizer during
| the RL training cycles?
| juanma0216 wrote:
| I prefer the approach of focusing on faster models despite
| their lower intelligence because I want my IDE to fly when I
| can see the code. I find this useful when I need to manually
| debug something that any model is able to do, so I know it's
| going to fail but at least it will fail fast. On the other
| hand, if I need more intelligence I have my other CLI that
| doesn't allow me to see the code but gets the planning and
| difficult code done.
| srush wrote:
| Our view is that there is a now a minimal amount of
| intelligence that is necessary to be productive, and that if
| you can pair that with speed that is awesome.
| smg wrote:
| Can you please tell us more about how you used Ray for setting
| up the RL infrastructure?
| srush wrote:
| Oh good question. Actually speaking at the Ray Summit next
| week in SF so we will talk more about it. We used Ray
| throughout the pipeline for running evals, for the RL
| controller, for data collation, and for visualizations. One
| tool we found helpful was Ray Data which let us easily scale
| over data and run logs.
| nvartolomei wrote:
| Please share more about Ray Data use case.
| srush wrote:
| We use Ray data for our map-style processing jobs. For
| example one tool have runs over all the rollouts from the
| RL system and collects qualitative statistics to
| understand which type of agent trajectories are being
| reward, and what types of searches and terminal commands
| are being made.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Do you have any graphs handy that kind of replicates the one
| used first in the blog post but a bit less ambiguous, maybe
| without model grouping? I feel like it would have been a bit
| more fair to include proper names, and individualize them
| rather than group everything together by _something_ , and then
| present your own model on its own.
| coder543 wrote:
| Impressive systems write-up. A question: if Composer is an RL
| finetune on an open model, why keep weights closed? The edge
| from a slightly better checkpoint erodes quickly in this
| market, it's not a durable advantage. Composer protects
| Cursor's margins from being squeezed by the big AI labs, but
| that is true whether the weights are open or closed, and I
| think Cursor would have more lasting benefit by generating
| developer goodwill than from a narrow, short-lived advantage.
| But, that's just my opinion. I personally find it hard to get
| excited about yet-another proprietary model. GPT-5 and Sonnet
| 4.5 are around when I need one of those, but I think the future
| is open.
| swyx wrote:
| see also https://cursor.com/changelog/2-0 and
| https://cursor.com/blog/2-0
|
| other links across the web:
|
| https://x.com/amanrsanger/status/1983581288755032320?s=46
|
| https://x.com/cursor_ai/status/1983567619946147967?s=46
| swyx wrote:
| my very small nit is... why is the model called Composer?? of
| all things?? when there was already a Cursor Composer from
| 2024.
|
| Cursor Cheetah wouldve been amazing. reusing the Composer name
| feels like the reverse OpenAI Codex move haha
| srush wrote:
| We like the name Composer and were sad to see it go. Excited
| to bring it back. (Agree Cheetah is a cool name too.)
| OsrsNeedsf2P wrote:
| One thing no competitor is serious on is average response
| completion time. Cursor lapped everyone there
| srush wrote:
| There are lots of good models we like here. But we agree that
| getting the right point on the smart+fast graph can make
| agentic coding feel really good.
|
| (Cursor researcher)
| 80hd wrote:
| Insane velocity from the Cursor team. I wonder how they move so
| fast?
| srush wrote:
| We don't wear shoes [1].
|
| [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/no-shoes-policy-in-office-
| cu...
| timcobb wrote:
| I would have thought it's because you use Cursor...
| numbers wrote:
| Please keep the naming of your models sane, I'd like to know that
| composer 1 is the first model and composer 2 is second but
| composer 1o is not yet another 1 variant that's actually newer
| and better than 2, that's just dumb. Not that you're doing that,
| some other companies do that.
| srush wrote:
| We will do our best. Luckily I don't think there are major
| telecom companies called Composer-2.
| carlosbaraza wrote:
| Could anyone explain how to use multiple agents and subagents in
| Cursor, Claude Code, or others? It is already challenging to me
| taming one model doing work, let alone synchronizing multiple
| parallel workers.
|
| Do you have to split the plan in parallelizable tasks that could
| be worked in parallel in one codebase without breaking and
| confusing the other agents?
| asdev wrote:
| you can use git worktrees and just have multiple Claude Code
| terminal instances working on each worktree. That way they
| don't clash, just delete the worktree when the task is done.
| carlosbaraza wrote:
| I have never leveraged git worktrees... That is such a crazy
| useful tool that I am almost ashamed of not having researched
| it before. Git is such a beautiful piece of software.
| asdev wrote:
| I built an open source project to make the whole workflow
| easier: https://github.com/built-by-as/FleetCode
| asdev wrote:
| is Cursor Bench open? Would like to see an open benchmark for
| agentic coding
| srush wrote:
| Unfortunately not, as we used our own internal code for the
| benchmark. We would also like to see more benchmarks that
| reflect the day-to-day agentic coding use.
| gabriel666smith wrote:
| Is there any information at all available, anywhere, on what
| Cursor Bench is testing and how?
|
| It's the most prominent part of the release post - but it's
| really hard to understand what exactly it's saying.
| srush wrote:
| Roughly, we had Cursor software engineers record real
| questions they were asking models, and then had them record
| the PR that they made that contained the result. We then
| cleaned these up. That is the benchmark.
| ukblewis wrote:
| Which programming languages/tools/libraries did the teams
| questions/code involve?
| carlosbaraza wrote:
| Cursor 2.0 keeps crashing on me while having an agent running and
| opening the IDE part of the application. I might have to
| rollback.
| amilich wrote:
| Hey - really sorry to hear this - could you email me
| andrew@cursor.com? Here are 3 suggestions to try- 1. Reset your
| settings.json - if shared with vscode, sometimes settings can
| cause perf regressions 2. Could you try cmd-shift-p -> "capture
| and send debugging data"? Will send us some profiling data to
| debug 3. Clear your user data (will delete chats) as a last
| resort - cmd-shift-p, "reveal user data," close the app, then
| delete this folder and restart the app
| neuronexmachina wrote:
| For anyone else who was wondering, it looks like the within-
| Cursor model pricing for Cursor Composer is identical to
| gemini-2.5-pro, gpt-5, and gpt-5-codex:
| https://cursor.com/docs/models#model-pricing
|
| ($1.25 input, $1.25 cache write, $0.13 cache read, and $10 output
| per million tokens)
| lubujackson wrote:
| I'm curious if their near-term expectation is that this is be
| better than these models or is this a model they tend to use in
| Auto mode, or if the focus is really if you want speed...? I
| guess my question is why would I actively chose this over Auto?
| cwyers wrote:
| The lack of transparency here is wild. They aggregate the scores
| of the models they test against, which obscures the performance.
| They only release results on their own internal benchmark that
| they won't release. They talk about RL training but they don't
| discuss anything else about how the model was trained, including
| if they did their own pre-training or fine-tuned an existing
| model. I'm skeptical of basically everything claimed here until
| either they share more details or someone is able to
| interpedently benchmark this.
| timcobb wrote:
| I wish it was easy to find out how much it costs relative to
| Claude :)
| skeptrune wrote:
| Facts. They really need to make pricing more clear across the
| entire product.
| sebdufbeau wrote:
| As a stealth model, it was priced as $1.25M in / $10M out
|
| Right now, it seems free when you are a Cursor Pro user, but
| I'd love more clarity on how much it will cost (I can't believe
| it'll be unlimited usage for subscribers)
| Jayakumark wrote:
| This looks like a model RLed on top of Qwen3-Coder or GLM 4.6 as
| per their graph and foot note.
| netcraft wrote:
| I love cursor, the tab completion and agent mode. But I really
| dislike vscode after using intellij for so many years. I really
| wish the underlying editor was better, or I could get cursor
| features in intellij instead. The editing of the files is mostly
| fine, but its everything else around it that a full IDE provides
| thats just so much better. Right now its intellij + claude code
| for me, and its fine, but I wish I could get the AI power of
| cursor in a better package.
| Jcampuzano2 wrote:
| Building off of VSCode was probably Cursors silver bullet and
| the best decision they could have ever made.
|
| It made migrating for everyone using VSCode (probably the
| single most popular editor) or another vscode forked editor
| (but at the time it was basically all VSCode) as simple as
| install and import settings.
|
| I do not think Cursor would have done nearly as well as it has
| if it didn't. So even though it can be subpar in some areas due
| to VSCodes baggage, its probably staying that way for a while.
| netcraft wrote:
| I dont disagree with anything you said. If I was in their
| shoes, I would have done exactly the same thing.
|
| Maybe my complaint is that I wish vscode had more features
| like intellij, or that intellij was the open source baseline
| a lot of other things could be built on.
|
| Intellij is not without its cruft and problems, dont get me
| wrong. But its git integration, search, navigation, database
| tools - I could go on - all of these features are just so
| much nicer than what vscode offers.
| pbowyer wrote:
| Intellij's tab-complete is coming along; it's hit and miss if
| it will work but for similar edits I'm finding it picks up the
| pattern quickly and I can tab - tab - tab to make them happen.
|
| Still not up to Cursor standards though :)
| simonw wrote:
| Here's the Composer 1 pelican riding a bicycle:
| https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2025/cursor-1-pelica...
| jeffnv wrote:
| honestly better than I expected
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