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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 abou

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.

nusl 10mo ago
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 10mo ago
  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.
  - atomicUpdate 10mo ago
    I expect the formatter/linter to be run as part of presubmit and/or committing the code so it doesn't matter how it's edited and saved by the developer. It's strange to hear of a specific IDE being mandated to work around that, and making quick edits with tools like vi unsupported.
    - CharlieDigital 10mo ago
      This was with Rider which had its own rules for which we hadn't set up an override in .editorconfig.
  - tyre 10mo ago
    allow me to introduce you to the lord and savior, https://pre-commit.com/ https://pre-commit.com/
    - adamcharnock 10mo ago
      Agreed. Also Lefthook: https://github.com/evilmartians/lefthook https://github.com/evilmartians/lefthook
    - robertfw 10mo ago
      and if your pre-commit runs fast (thank you, ruff), you can set this up as a post-edit hook in claude code
      - jswny 10mo ago
        I would not recommend this. A hook that modifies files causes Claude to have to re-read the file before modifying it again, which can build up your context window fast
  - whalesalad 10mo ago
    Part of a healthy codebase is ensuring that anyone can hack on it, regardless of their editor setup. Relying on something in .vscode and just assuming people are using that editor is what leads to this kind of situation. Bake that into the workflow some other way.
    - satvikpendem 10mo ago
      Or just enforce that the team all uses the same tools, and you save quite a lot in productivity between making things work on different tools, more so than whatever productivity gains individual devs on the team get from using their own preferred tools. Many teams I know issue everyone MacBooks and enforce VSCode usage, for example, and that has saved so much time compared to other teams I've seen where devs can choose between macOS or Windows for example.
      - deleted 10mo ago
        [deleted]
      - wredcoll 10mo ago
        Saves so much time??? Really? You set up a dev env once, how much time is it even possible to save?
        satvikpendem 10mo ago
        No, it's saving time because some things might work on one OS but not another, and then dealing with updates to each OS that might break something, or we need a new piece of software but it doesn't work on Windows for local development, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. There are so many ways it goes wrong, I speak from personal experience.
jstummbillig 10mo ago
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 10mo ago
  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.
  - enraged_camel 10mo ago
    I used it extensively for a week and gave it an honest chance. It’s really good for quickly troubleshooting small bugs. It doesn’t come anywhere close to Opus 4.5 though.
    - infecto 10mo ago
      Apples and oranges comparison. I don’t think it’s the same and good for you for waiting on Opus to respond. I don’t have the energy.
      - baq 10mo ago
        > Waiting for Opus Sir Opus is the fast one of the bunch. Try GPT 5.2 high.
        infecto 10mo ago
        Sir I don’t use GPT 5.2. I value speed and accuracy. Not accuracy alone.
  - bangaladore 10mo ago
bangaladore 10mo ago
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 10mo ago
  > 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.
  - neutronicus 10mo ago
    Does it have some huge context window? Or is it really good at grep? The Copilot version of this is just fucking terrible at suggesting anything remotely useful about our codebase. I've had reasonable success just sticking single giant functions into context and asking Sonnet 4.5 targeted questions (is anything in this function modifying X, does this function appear to be doing Y) as a shortcut for reading through the whole thing or scattershot text search. When I try to give it a whole file I actually hit single-query token limits. But that's very "opt-in" on my part, and different from how I understand Cursor to work.
the_mitsuhiko 10mo ago
> 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.
- Sleaker 10mo ago
  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?
  - the_mitsuhiko 10mo ago
    > Can cursor even do anything that vscode can't right now? Right now VSCode can do things that Cursor cannot, but mostly because of the market place. If Cursor invests money into the actual IDE part of the product I can see them eclipsing Microsoft at the game. They definitely have the momentum. But at least some of the folks I follow on Twitter that were die-hard Cursor users have moved back to VSCode for a variety of reasons over the last few months, so not sure. Microsoft itself though is currently kinda mismanaging the entire product range between GitHub, VS Code and copilot, so I would not be surprised if Cursor manages to capitalize on this.
    - selestify 10mo ago
      How is Microsoft mismanaging things?
      - the_mitsuhiko 10mo ago
        GitHub, Copilot and VS Code are I believe the same org. Or at least, that’s what the branding implies. Copilot / VS Code lost all headstart and barely catch up, GitHub is currently largely being seen as a leader less organization that has lost it’s direction. The recent outrage about pricing changes being an excellent example of this.
bhl 10mo ago
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 10mo ago
  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 10mo ago
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.
redox99 10mo ago
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 10mo ago
> 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 10mo ago
  CLI based development predates IDEs for a couple of decades, and we moved away for very good reasons.
  - noodletheworld 10mo ago
    Strawman. Imaginary situation: People are using claude instead of cursor, and you can run claude in a terminal, so this is going back to the days of not using an IDE for the people that do it. Straw man shake down: Terminal based development like vim and emacs are old and shit, and we moved away from that for a reason, and so (although totally unrelated) this means 'using claude' means going back to using a terminal for everything, which is similarly old and shit. ...but, obviously wrong. - There's a claude desktop app that isn't done via the terminal. - Agents use the terminal/powershell to do lots of things, even in cursor because that's the only way to automate some things, eg. running tests. - Terminal environments like vim and emacs are ides. :face-palm: - It literally makes no difference what interface you copy and paste your text prompt into and then walk off to get a coffee in agent mode. Anyone who's seriously arguing that IDE integrated LLM chat windows somehow beat command line LLM chat windows is either a) religiously opposed to the terminal window, or b) hasn't actually tried using the tools. ...because, you'll find it makes no difference at all. Why is cursor getting involved with graphite? ...because the one place where is makes a difference is reviewing code, where most CLI based tools (eg. `git diff`) are just generally inferior to visual integrated code review tools. You know what that is? An acknowledgement that cursor, in terms of code generation has nothing that qualifies as the 'special sauce' to use it over any other tool. CLI or not. So they're investing in another company that actually has a good, meaningful product.
    - 10mo ago
k4rli 10mo ago
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.

nusl 10mo ago

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 10mo ago
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.
- atomicUpdate 10mo ago
  I expect the formatter/linter to be run as part of presubmit and/or committing the code so it doesn't matter how it's edited and saved by the developer. It's strange to hear of a specific IDE being mandated to work around that, and making quick edits with tools like vi unsupported.
  - CharlieDigital 10mo ago
    This was with Rider which had its own rules for which we hadn't set up an override in .editorconfig.
- tyre 10mo ago
  allow me to introduce you to the lord and savior, https://pre-commit.com/ https://pre-commit.com/
  - adamcharnock 10mo ago
    Agreed. Also Lefthook: https://github.com/evilmartians/lefthook https://github.com/evilmartians/lefthook
  - robertfw 10mo ago
    and if your pre-commit runs fast (thank you, ruff), you can set this up as a post-edit hook in claude code
    - jswny 10mo ago
      I would not recommend this. A hook that modifies files causes Claude to have to re-read the file before modifying it again, which can build up your context window fast
- whalesalad 10mo ago
  Part of a healthy codebase is ensuring that anyone can hack on it, regardless of their editor setup. Relying on something in .vscode and just assuming people are using that editor is what leads to this kind of situation. Bake that into the workflow some other way.
  - satvikpendem 10mo ago
    Or just enforce that the team all uses the same tools, and you save quite a lot in productivity between making things work on different tools, more so than whatever productivity gains individual devs on the team get from using their own preferred tools. Many teams I know issue everyone MacBooks and enforce VSCode usage, for example, and that has saved so much time compared to other teams I've seen where devs can choose between macOS or Windows for example.
    - deleted 10mo ago
      [deleted]
    - wredcoll 10mo ago
      Saves so much time??? Really? You set up a dev env once, how much time is it even possible to save?
      - satvikpendem 10mo ago
        No, it's saving time because some things might work on one OS but not another, and then dealing with updates to each OS that might break something, or we need a new piece of software but it doesn't work on Windows for local development, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. There are so many ways it goes wrong, I speak from personal experience.

jstummbillig 10mo ago

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 10mo ago
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.
- enraged_camel 10mo ago
  I used it extensively for a week and gave it an honest chance. It’s really good for quickly troubleshooting small bugs. It doesn’t come anywhere close to Opus 4.5 though.
  - infecto 10mo ago
    Apples and oranges comparison. I don’t think it’s the same and good for you for waiting on Opus to respond. I don’t have the energy.
    - baq 10mo ago
      > Waiting for Opus Sir Opus is the fast one of the bunch. Try GPT 5.2 high.
      - infecto 10mo ago
        Sir I don’t use GPT 5.2. I value speed and accuracy. Not accuracy alone.
- bangaladore 10mo ago

bangaladore 10mo ago

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 10mo ago
> 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.
- neutronicus 10mo ago
  Does it have some huge context window? Or is it really good at grep? The Copilot version of this is just fucking terrible at suggesting anything remotely useful about our codebase. I've had reasonable success just sticking single giant functions into context and asking Sonnet 4.5 targeted questions (is anything in this function modifying X, does this function appear to be doing Y) as a shortcut for reading through the whole thing or scattershot text search. When I try to give it a whole file I actually hit single-query token limits. But that's very "opt-in" on my part, and different from how I understand Cursor to work.

the_mitsuhiko 10mo ago

> 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.

Sleaker 10mo ago
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?
- the_mitsuhiko 10mo ago
  > Can cursor even do anything that vscode can't right now? Right now VSCode can do things that Cursor cannot, but mostly because of the market place. If Cursor invests money into the actual IDE part of the product I can see them eclipsing Microsoft at the game. They definitely have the momentum. But at least some of the folks I follow on Twitter that were die-hard Cursor users have moved back to VSCode for a variety of reasons over the last few months, so not sure. Microsoft itself though is currently kinda mismanaging the entire product range between GitHub, VS Code and copilot, so I would not be surprised if Cursor manages to capitalize on this.
  - selestify 10mo ago
    How is Microsoft mismanaging things?
    - the_mitsuhiko 10mo ago
      GitHub, Copilot and VS Code are I believe the same org. Or at least, that’s what the branding implies. Copilot / VS Code lost all headstart and barely catch up, GitHub is currently largely being seen as a leader less organization that has lost it’s direction. The recent outrage about pricing changes being an excellent example of this.

bhl 10mo ago

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 10mo ago
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 10mo ago

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.

redox99 10mo ago

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 10mo ago

> 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 10mo ago
CLI based development predates IDEs for a couple of decades, and we moved away for very good reasons.
- noodletheworld 10mo ago
  Strawman. Imaginary situation: People are using claude instead of cursor, and you can run claude in a terminal, so this is going back to the days of not using an IDE for the people that do it. Straw man shake down: Terminal based development like vim and emacs are old and shit, and we moved away from that for a reason, and so (although totally unrelated) this means 'using claude' means going back to using a terminal for everything, which is similarly old and shit. ...but, obviously wrong. - There's a claude desktop app that isn't done via the terminal. - Agents use the terminal/powershell to do lots of things, even in cursor because that's the only way to automate some things, eg. running tests. - Terminal environments like vim and emacs are ides. :face-palm: - It literally makes no difference what interface you copy and paste your text prompt into and then walk off to get a coffee in agent mode. Anyone who's seriously arguing that IDE integrated LLM chat windows somehow beat command line LLM chat windows is either a) religiously opposed to the terminal window, or b) hasn't actually tried using the tools. ...because, you'll find it makes no difference at all. Why is cursor getting involved with graphite? ...because the one place where is makes a difference is reviewing code, where most CLI based tools (eg. `git diff`) are just generally inferior to visual integrated code review tools. You know what that is? An acknowledgement that cursor, in terms of code generation has nothing that qualifies as the 'special sauce' to use it over any other tool. CLI or not. So they're investing in another company that actually has a good, meaningful product.
  - 10mo ago

k4rli 10mo ago

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.