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Comment by datadrivenangel | Hacker News Reader

For lighter interactive agentic coding, where you type stuff into an IDE and a minute or three later get results back for review, composer 2.5 is honestly pretty great. The results get notably worse for larger tasks though.

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Agreed. It’s worse than Opus of course. But Opus takes more than 10x longer to give you something to look at. I’m not kidding, I “benchmarked” a real ticket I was working on. Opus 4.7 took more than 30min. Opus 4.8 took over an hour. Composer 2.5 took 5min on the exact same prompt & local setup. My subjective review is that composer’s code was only like 10-20% worse. It still worked, it was just a bit less clean and a little more hacky. But it’s not like Opus is flawless either. At the end of the day, if it takes an hour to get to draft code I can look at and iterate on… that’s fucking impossible for me. Unless it did an excellent job. But as long as I still need to review and follow up with changes, Opus is just too slow. It’s really frustrating because it’s a lot slower than it was 6mo ago, and not noticeably better. Fable seems a step in the right direction but is $$$$

Opus is so damn slow that it's forced me to work on multiple items at a time, whenever possible. Waiting for one session? Just switch to another!

Yeah, only way to use Opus is with 2-3 different sessions running side by side, or ask it to be the main conductor and delegate tasks to sub agents. Definitely a new way of thinking for me, but I'm liking it to some degree!

Cursor's Composer 2.5 is refreshingly fast by comparison, but I don't trust it as much as Opus. And Composer doesn't have 1 million context...

I'm not disputing what you're saying. The slowness of Opus in particular is pretty accurate but you should have been getting little popups in Cursor saying Opus is under load and to try switching to other models?

I mentioned my frustration with Composer in another thread and why I rely on Opus, but Opus, atleast via Cursor is practically unusable for me M-F 9-5 EST. As a result, I have modified my working schedule outside those hours when I use Opus. On weekends and nights, Opus via Cursor is at the same speed as Composer but vastly superior quality where it's not even comparable.

Composer is not 20% worse than Opus for me. Composer hands me a quickly put together college project that was started the night before it was due. Opus hands me a actual production ready deliverable that I can defend if I was sued in court.

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