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Composer 2.5: Cursor's In-House Model Grows Up

TL;DR Composer 2.5 is Cursor’s most capable in-house coding model yet, built on Moonshot’s open-source Kimi K2.5 checkpoint with about 85% of total training compute spent on Cursor’s own continued pretraining and RL The model is purpose-built for the agent loop inside Cursor - long-horizon tasks, hundreds of tool calls, multi-step instructions - rather than as a general-purpose chat model Cursor claims parity with Claude Opus 4.7 and GPT-5.5 on its own CursorBench v3.1 (63.2%) and a strong 79.8% on SWE-Bench Multilingual Pricing is dramatically lower: $0.50 / $2.50 per million input/output tokens on the default variant, with included usage doubled for the first week Together with SpaceXAI, Cursor is now training a much larger successor model from scratch on Colossus 2 with around 10x the compute - so 2.5 is a waypoint, not the endgame For a while, Cursor was an IDE wrapped around someone else’s models - Claude, GPT, Gemini. That story has shifted. With Composer 2.5, released this week, Cursor has shipped its most capable first-party coding model yet, and it is a serious enough piece of work that it deserves real consideration as a daily driver rather than a budget fallback. ...

May 18, 2026 · 8 min · James M
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My AI-Augmented Design Workflow: A 10-Minute Loop From Discussion to Documented Decision

TL;DR A combination of Cursor in the IDE, Claude Code and Codex in the terminal, and GitHub Spec Kit as the living contract has collapsed the discuss-design-document loop from days to under ten minutes Every meeting is transcribed and checked into GitHub alongside the design corpus, giving AI agents access to the full historical record - not just curated decisions but the debates that shaped them Model selection matters: cheaper, faster models for throwaway sketches and small refactors; expensive models (Opus) for large cross-repo work where the cost of a wrong answer is high The real transformation is cognitive flow - removing friction between thinking and recording means decisions get made and captured while the problem is still fresh, with almost no context switching AI is now suggesting improvements faster than the author can implement them; the next bottleneck is compaction, not generation - asking the model to reduce documents to their load-bearing claims rather than produce more content Since making a combination of Cursor in the IDE and Claude Code and Codex in the terminal the centre of my working day - with ChatGPT for general questions and GitHub Spec Kit holding the design contract - the way I move from a question on Slack to a documented design decision has changed beyond recognition. ...

April 29, 2026 · 14 min · James M

Claude Code vs Cursor: A 6-Month Comparison

After six months of daily use, here is how the two heavyweights of AI-assisted coding compare: the terminal-native Claude Code and the IDE-integrated Cursor.

April 8, 2026 · 3 min · James M
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SpaceX Buys the Right to Buy Cursor for $60 Billion

TL;DR SpaceX has signed an option to acquire Cursor (made by Anysphere) for $60 billion, or pay $10 billion for the joint work if it walks away Cursor’s valuation has risen 24x in fifteen months - from $2.5 billion in January 2025 to a $60 billion option price in April 2026 The deal sits under SpaceX rather than xAI directly, because SpaceX holds the balance sheet after the SpaceX - xAI merger valued at $1.25 trillion For xAI, buying Cursor is a faster route to developer relevance than out-marketing OpenAI’s Codex or Anthropic’s Claude Code If the acquisition closes, three of the main AI coding interfaces will sit inside three frontier labs - raising questions about model neutrality and pricing pressure on independent tools It’s rare to see an option contract make the front page, but that is what landed on 21 April 2026. SpaceX disclosed that it has signed a deal with Cursor - the AI coding tool made by Anysphere - giving it the right to buy the startup outright for $60 billion later this year, or to walk away with a $10 billion payment for the joint work the two teams are doing in the meantime. ...

April 2, 2026 · 6 min · James M