Isn't there a cli version of cursor by now?

Damn do I feel the UI changes being a pain point.

It’s a near constant regression in my workflows. “Multiple agents” got destroyed recently, and the new interface for it some sort of command isn’t as good or reliable. Then you’ve got modals everywhere[1] and truncated bits (like long branch names) that make it insanely frustrating to use.

They’re constantly changing the UI without actually improving it at all. I’ll likely cancel it and use opencode for personal stuff with Deepseek and only use it at work because I have to. There was a time when I appreciated the harness but it’s becoming less useful, or at least noticeable, over time… all the while the actual UI becomes substantially more painful and awkward to use (like @ in the “agents” window being completely unable to find a file because it’s some sort of “global” scope).

One thing that surprises me about this whole segment is that JetBrains haven’t eaten these folks lunch. Their IDEs are leagues better than VSCode but their AI integration is awful by comparison (and the bar is low). I can’t even see how much of the context window I have left.

[1] it’s insane I have to answer questions in a tiny input box I cannot resize or adjust the size of. Let alone the fact the text area I input prompts into cannot be resized. Truly feels like the UI/UX is done by people without any experience.

Good point.

One of the things I've came to appreciate about the cli tools like Codex or Claude is that the interface is so limited that every feature they release is still limited and constrained to the same UX limitations, whereas those "funkier" IDEs change from month to month giving me further fatigue.

The problem with this is that we do not know the actual cost. For all we know they might be pulling an Anthropic. Subsidizing costs to get users, then increasing them later on.

AI revenue has been going up while the cost per token has been rapidly falling. The Jevons paradox applies here. The cheaper software is, the more software is written. There is not a finite demand for software.

The way I have read their benchmark results is that they trained a model to work insanely well in their coding workflow. It’s not a general purpose model.

One of the surprisingly hardest problems to solve is to get a model to use the tools you give it access to.

this thing is so awesome on fast mode, so far i am impressed, some of its observations feel similar to opus.

i use gpt 5.5 and opus 4.7 a lot every day, if i can get good results at this speed, hopefully the usage level holds up on my team plan haha

> compress ai revenue like 15x

that roughly just puts it on par with OpenAI and Anthropic subscriptions in terms of pricing per token

I'm not sure that to be the case, it seems like bringing capabilities up and costs down merely serves to induce more demand.

> Really impressive how they've made this jump from being called the vscode fork with no moat just a couple of months ago.

Impressive, yes. But they still don't have a moat...

How much the RL they are doing really improves Kimi K2.5 is to be seen. So, right now, the ground truth is that they combined what they had with a strong open weights model. The RL improvement may be both marginal (since may folks report strong results with vanilla K2.6) and may mostly bias the model towards coding tasks: when a model like this is trained to be generalist, there is a tension between being good at one thing and the other, in terms of SFT and RL. You can see this in the DeepSeek v4 Flash training report for instance but it is a known fact. So if you have the GPUs and a decent RL pipeline that does not run the model you can indeed specialize it a bit more for a given task at the expenses of tasks people will not do inside Cursor. But, so far, the measurable reality is that Cursor uses an open weight model like most could do, and the RL story could be partilly a marketing move to call to Composer 2.5 more than a real strong gain, given that there is no way to verify and K2.5 was already strong. And we also know that they had to partner to do the training, which is also not a good news.

This was the only way forward.

In my opinion cursor actually has one of the best harnesses again at the moment.

Since the frontier is only 8-month ahead of DeepSeek, it is hard to see how model training can be a moat as all the tricks are available from open labs in China. You really just need <100m to bootstrap at this point.

They are still a vscode fork with no moat? Like they lost about 70% of users in half a year which goes to show how there is not even the tiniest of moat.

why is that part impressive specifically? they got purchased by SpaceX, they have access to infinite compute and cash now.

& now they're still losing all of their users to Claude Code and Codex.

It's still a VsCode fork just now with a Kimi fine tune and still no moat...

I won't debate that it turns out none of this mattered when it came to being as successful company though and kinda makes anyone who tried to roll their own instead of fork look a little silly.

I doubt it's a brand new model. It's likely just Kimi K2.5 further trained on coding.

they say it themselves in the post - behavior dimensions "not well captured by existing benchmarks". that was the exact problem with composer 2. not dumber on individual tasks, just bad at session-level decisions like when to stop editing, how much context to carry forward, when to re-read a file vs assume. you don't catch any of that in an isolated eval.

As I have said before in prior composer threads. The proof is in the usage. I am inclined to somewhat believe the results as I use composer and also take the results for the given context. It’s not a general purpose sota model. It’s a model that runs inexpensively in their coding workflow that is creating results similar to opus or gpt.

Well is that a statement about the quality of Opus 4.7 or about compose 2.5? :P

Isn’t it a really cheap alternative to sota models (according to benchmarks)?

Thanks! Link belatedly changed above.

We moved off Cursor and onto Codex + Claude Code. Cost went from multiple thousand per engineer per month to about $500

My company is shifting us from Cursor to Claude due to increased costs.

Check which model you're using.

The fast version of composer is the default now (which costs ~x3 as much).

Keep in mind I believe there is a larger buffer given to personal plans. If they have 50% extra with the personal plan you now only get 25%.

My cursor costs sky rocketed recently too

> and not that they messed up that relationship.

There's nothing to mess up. The license is MIT w/ attribution, and the attribution clause can be easily sidestepped w/o any legal repercussions. The "drama" was simply content creators going nuts over some misunderstandings and poor comms from some kimi related devs.

That's 3.0