Ok this might be weird but I've moved everyone in my 4 person team to our team plan and costs seem to have sky rocketed compared to the individual plans. Where before most people spent 20-100 USD, now the total bill is more like 1k USD. I haven't gone into the details but it feels like I'm being scammed.
The model is (like Composer 2) based on Kimi K2.5 and they claim SOTA performance for 1/10th of the cost. The tweet also mentions that they've started a new model from scratch on Colossus 2 (xAI/SpaceX Cluster). Really impressive how they've made this jump from being called the vscode fork with no moat just a couple of months ago.
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.
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.
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 set themselves up for flack when they use whatever these evals are… they did the same for composer 2 which was evaled in close competition with frontier models, spoiler alert, it wasn’t even close in practice.
So now 2.5 is supposed to compete with opus 4.7? Sure…
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.
I don't think so. They're comparing it to the highest tier available models from Anthropic and OpenAI. Generally speaking, Opus is better than Sonnet in almost every way, so why have the redundancy?
Congratulations on the launch! I'm interested in trying Cursor but it's very confusing what I should buy. What does the Pro $20 plan get me in usage if I only use Composer 2.5? How fast is the model?
I use $20 plan on daily basis for more than a year now, and have yet to exhaust that limit. The plan includes $20 in api costs for non-Cursor premium models and $20 for Composer and Auto models provided by Cursor themselves.
That said, I am pretty old-fashioned coder and use LLM mostly to overcome the blank page problem, which means I review and often rewrite LLM output by hand and avoid prompt loops for a single task.
People who are aiming to not read code any more might find this $20 plan lacking for their needs, however for my needs it fits perfectly.
Their previous Composer was already marketed as a cheap model capable of competing with SOTA on most tasks. The evals they shared back then backed this up but in my day-to-day usage it fell short across the board. Canceled my cursor subscription and switched to Claude Code a few weeks ago. It has its own shortcomings but in terms of model capability and UX quality Cursor will have a hard time competing in the long term. Elon Musk will be a very good way out for them.
Ok this might be weird but I've moved everyone in my 4 person team to our team plan and costs seem to have sky rocketed compared to the individual plans. Where before most people spent 20-100 USD, now the total bill is more like 1k USD. I haven't gone into the details but it feels like I'm being scammed.
My cursor costs sky rocketed recently too
The model is (like Composer 2) based on Kimi K2.5 and they claim SOTA performance for 1/10th of the cost. The tweet also mentions that they've started a new model from scratch on Colossus 2 (xAI/SpaceX Cluster). Really impressive how they've made this jump from being called the vscode fork with no moat just a couple of months ago.
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.
I feel like they've been targeting enterprise pretty hard. I know my company uses them, and the companies that hire us also use Cursor.
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 didn't say it's a new model... in fact they said exactly what you just said.
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.
> 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...
Full details https://cursor.com/blog/composer-2-5
They set themselves up for flack when they use whatever these evals are… they did the same for composer 2 which was evaled in close competition with frontier models, spoiler alert, it wasn’t even close in practice.
So now 2.5 is supposed to compete with opus 4.7? Sure…
Well is that a statement about the quality of Opus 4.7 or about compose 2.5? :P
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.
It's always great that more companies are throwing their hat in the ring, especially focusing on value (latency + intelligence + cost)
Non-x link: https://cursor.com/blog/composer-2-5 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48182126)
Did they just upgrade Kimi 2.5 to 2.6?
It's a bit odd that they're not comparing it against Sonnet
I don't think so. They're comparing it to the highest tier available models from Anthropic and OpenAI. Generally speaking, Opus is better than Sonnet in almost every way, so why have the redundancy?
The tweet specifies that the new model is geared towards long-running tasks, which is what you'd use a model like Opus for anyway.
Congratulations on the launch! I'm interested in trying Cursor but it's very confusing what I should buy. What does the Pro $20 plan get me in usage if I only use Composer 2.5? How fast is the model?
I use $20 plan on daily basis for more than a year now, and have yet to exhaust that limit. The plan includes $20 in api costs for non-Cursor premium models and $20 for Composer and Auto models provided by Cursor themselves.
That said, I am pretty old-fashioned coder and use LLM mostly to overcome the blank page problem, which means I review and often rewrite LLM output by hand and avoid prompt loops for a single task.
People who are aiming to not read code any more might find this $20 plan lacking for their needs, however for my needs it fits perfectly.
The limits are probably even higher than that, i seem to get about 100$+ of usage on composer and about 45-50 usd on non composer models
Their previous Composer was already marketed as a cheap model capable of competing with SOTA on most tasks. The evals they shared back then backed this up but in my day-to-day usage it fell short across the board. Canceled my cursor subscription and switched to Claude Code a few weeks ago. It has its own shortcomings but in terms of model capability and UX quality Cursor will have a hard time competing in the long term. Elon Musk will be a very good way out for them.