[jonathannorris]

Yeah, hard disagree on that one, based on recent surveys, 80-90% of developers globally use IDEs over CLIs for their day-to-day work.

I was pretty worried about Cursor's business until they launched their Composer 1 model, which is fine-tuned to work amazingly well in their IDE. It's significantly faster than using any other model, and it's clearly fine-tuned for the type of work people use Cursor for. They are also clearly charging a premium for it and making a healthy margin on it, but for how fast + good it's totally worth it.

Composer 1 + now eventually creating an AI native version of GitHub with Graphite, that's a serious business, with a much clearer picture to me how Cursor gets to serious profitability vs the AI labs.

[bangaladore]

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 And even if it did, it would become outdated very quickly.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.

[santoriv]

> 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.

[spruce_tips]

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

[nusl]

OP isn't saying to do all of your work in the terminal; they're saying they prefer CLI-based LLM interfaces. You can have your IDE running alongside it just fine, and the CLIs can often present the changes as diffs in the IDEs too.

[CharlieDigital]

This is how some folks on my team work. Ran into this when I saved a file manually and the editor ran formatting on it. Turns out that the dev that wrote it only codes via CLI though reviews the files in an IDE so he never manually saved it and ran the formatter.

[the_mitsuhiko]

> Yeah, hard disagree on that one, based on recent surveys, 80-90% of developers globally use IDEs over CLIs for their day-to-day work.

I have absolutely no horse in this race, but I turned from a 100% Cursor user at the beginning of the year, to one that basically uses agents for 90% of my work, and VS Code for the rest of it. The value proposition that Cursor gave me was not able to compete with what the basic Max subscription on anthropic gave me, and VS Code is still a superior experience to Claude in the IDE space.

I think though that Cursor has all the potential to beat Microsoft at the IDE game if they focus on it. But I would say it's by no way a given that this is the default outcome.

[dimitri-vs]

This is me. Was a huge Cursor fan, tried Claude Code, didn't get it, tried it again a year ago and it finally clicked a week later I cancelled my Cursor sub and now using VS Code.

I don't even like using CLI, in fact I hate it, but I don't use CLI - Claude does it for me. Using for everything: Obsidian vault, working on Home Assistant, editing GSheets, and so much more.

[Sleaker]

How does company X dependant on company Y product beat company Y in what is essentially just small UI differences? Can cursor even do anything that vscode can't right now?

[redox99]

Hard disagree.

Composer is extremely dumb compared to sonnet, let alone opus. I see no reason to use it. Yes, it's cheaper, but your time is not free.

[aqme28]

> Yeah, hard disagree on that one, based on recent surveys, 80-90% of developers globally use IDEs over CLIs for their day-to-day work.

This is a pretty dumb statistic in a vacuum. It was clearly 100% a few years ago before CLI-based development was even possible. The trend is very significant.

[pjmlp]

CLI based development predates IDEs for a couple of decades, and we moved away for very good reasons.

[bhl]

It does not matter what 80-90% of developers do. Code development is heavily tail-skewed: focus on the frontier and on the people who are able to output production-level code at a much higher pace than the rest.

[trollbridge]

No kidding. Arguing "90% of devs do this" makes it that much more likely that it's something that the bottom 90% of devs do.

[freeone3000]

I use an IDE. It has a command line in it. It also has my keybinds, build flow, editor preferences, and CI integrations. Making something CLI means I can use it from my IDE, and possibly soon with my IDE.

[jstummbillig]

Say more? It's the first time I see Composer 1 being talked about outside of the Cursor press stuff, with high praise no less.

What are we talking about? Autocomplete or GPT/Claude contender or...? What makes it so great?

[infecto]

GPT contender. There has been talk on the cursor forums. I think largely people have e slept on coding models and stick with Anthropic thinking it’s the best. Composer fit that niche of extremely fast and smart enough. Sometimes you just want a model that has a near instant response. The new Gemini preview is overtaking my usage of Composer.

[k4rli]

Kilocode as an IDE plugin has completely removed Cursor from my toolkit.

Cursor has been both nice and awful. When it works, it has been good. However for a long time it would freeze on re-focus and recently an update broke my profile entirely on one machine so it wouldn't even launch anymore.

Kilocode with options of free models has been very nice so far.