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bangaladoreyesterday at 6:11 PM2 repliesview on HN

As the other commenter stated, I don't use CLIs for development. I use VSCode.

I'm very pro IDE. I've built up an entire collection of VSCode extensions and workflows for programming, building, customizing build & debugging embedded systems within VSCode. But I still prefer CLI based AI (when talking about an agent to the IDE version).

> Composer 1

My bet is their model doesn't realistically compare to any of the frontier models. And even if it did, it would become outdated very quickly.

It seems somewhat clear (at least to me) that economics of scale heavily favor AI model development. Spend billions making massive models that are unusable due to cost and speed and distill their knowledge + fine tune them for stuff like tools. Generalists are better than specialists. You make one big model and produce 5 models that are SOTA in 5 different domains. Cursor can't do that realistically.


Replies

santorivyesterday at 6:23 PM

> My bet is their model doesn't realistically compare to any of the frontier models.

I've been using composer-1 in Cursor for a few weeks and also switching back and forth between it, Gemini Flash 3, Claude Opus 4.5, Claude Sonnet 4.5 and GPT 5.2.

And you're right it's not comparable. It's about the same quality of code output of the aforementioned models but about 4x as fast. Which enables a qualitatively different workflow for me where instead of me spending a bunch of time waiting on the model, the model is waiting on me to catch up with its outputs. After using composer-1, it feels painful to switch back to other models.

I work in a larg(ish) enterprise codebase. I spend a lot of time asking it questions about the codebase and then making small incremental changes. So it works very well for my particular workflow.

Other people use CLI and remote agents and that sort of thing and that's not really my workflow so other models might work better for other people.

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spruce_tipsyesterday at 6:53 PM

composer 1 has been my most used model the past few months. but i only use it to execute plans that i write with the help of larger, more intelligent models like opus 4.5. composer 1 is great at following plan instructions so after some careful time providing the right context and building a plan, it basically never messes up the implementation. sometimes requires a few small tweaks around the edges but overall a fantastic workflow that's so delightfully fast