Every time I use Composer 2.5 I have to spend a bunch of time cleaning up its mistakes. It is unusable compared to GPT 5.4 or 5.5.

My time is more valuable that I will use a model that doesn’t f** up my code base.

Keep composer away from anything configuration related—it will ruin your day.

Isn't Composer 2.5 designed to be used from the Cursor harness, and is otherwise not that useful?

I use it from the Cursor harness.

give it a structured plan and it it does really well compared to similar priced models. I'd never use it for anything that required heavy reasoning and it's not built for that.

Weird I use it 8 or so hours a day and I haven’t had that issue

It is hard to evaluate the model performance of Composer 2.5 when Cursor's harness is so awful compared to the others on the market.

In what way? I spend more of my time managing than hands on lately so I legitimately don’t know.

Not true. The only issue is cost of frontier models.

Not my experience at all. I've been using Cursor hardcore for about two weeks now and Composer 2.5 and it's wonderful. Now with Grok 4.5 I'm quite excited about the possibilities.

Yeah, it’s not great—except for debugging. It shines there.

Cursors whole moat is their harness. Other people have benched opus and GPT models through Claude code, codex, and cursor, and cursor came out on top everytime because of their harness.

The harness is commonly ranked one of the best. what specifically had you hating it?

Care to elaborate?

Composer 2.5 is so underrated IMO. I built a really feature rich application, insanely complicated, close to 200k LOC since it came out and for the most part it ran like a champ. Only used CLaude a couple times to get it unstuck. 8 hours a day and I'm paying about 30 a month.

> I built a really feature rich application, insanely complicated, close to 200k LOC

If you listed it, how many features/LOC or vice-versa? Really hard to know if 200K LOC is good or bad, at the surface it sounds like too much, but I don't know what the application was either.

It’s a fantastic signal processing / engineering app. There are 5 major players and this app isn’t quite as good but it’s in the ballpark. I’d day when I release early next nonth this will be the biggest fully featured vibe coded app I’m aware of.

I’d be curious to hear more about your dev setup and what tips you have for other aspiring vibe app coders.

I currently just use a Mac Mini M4 with cursor. I had 30 years programming before this (in my mid 40s now) so I am not a great person to give vibe coding advice because I have so much actual coding m. I’m pretty sure I couldn’t have done it without knowing how to code because there were some times even the best models would get stuck and I’d have to figure it out myself.

If I had to give advice I’d say to just do it. Work on some project that interests you and go for it

How do you like its design mode?

Suppose eventually that gravy train will disappear, might as well use it then.