HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

leerob

2,397 karma · joined December 13, 2015

https://leerob.com

https://meet.hn/city/41.5868654,-93.6249494/Des-Moines

Socials: - x.com/leerob - lee@leerob.com

submissionscomments
leerob··on Grok 4.6 scores 61 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index
We plan to eventually have another model at that weight class, but right now trying to train the best possible model.
leerob··on Grok 4.6 scores 61 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index
Probably can't advance frontier math yet, yeah. But please let us know other places you want to see Grok improve for future models!
leerob··on Grok 4.6
We are and will continue to.
leerob··on Grok 4.6
(I work on Grok) This isn't allowed. CSAM / deepfakes are against our acceptable use policy.
leerob··on Grok 4.6
(I work on Grok) We've been working on teaching the model how to reason about great visual design principles. Obviously this is hard and somewhat subjective, but through a combination of writing down these principles (e.g. how to think about systems, not just "use this italic serif font on marketing pages"), and then creating a lot of data to pairwise compare designs/outputs, we've made a notable improvement over G4.5 and see a path to improving much further in the next model.
leerob··on Grok Bot
It works with the highest tier Cursor/Grok accounts during the beta.
leerob··on Grok Bot
It's quite a bit different, namely that ChatGPT Work has both local conversations and cloud agents. But for each cloud agent, you are spinning up and tearing down a new VM each time. This is an always-on Linux box, which stays logged in. Additionally, your bots can talk to each other (although Codex did have the ability to reference threads, I am not sure if one thread could send messages to other threads).
leerob··on CursorBench 3.1
You can read our full technical report here: https://cursor.com/blog/composer-2-technical-report
leerob··on CursorBench 3.1
(I work at Cursor) We score well on Terminal-Bench and SWE-bench Multilingual. DeepSWE, not so great yet, as it's more for very long-horizon tasks. We're planning to include more public benchmarks in our next model release.
leerob··on CursorBench 3.1
(I work at Cursor) When Composer 2.5 launched, we initially scored very competitively on AA's composite benchmark. I believe 3rd place overall. They have recently updated to use DeepSWE, which has more of a focus on very long-horizon tasks, and Composer isn't as good at those yet. We're aware and working on this for our next model.

Overall, some benchmarks show Composer doing well, others not so much. We think the model is very capable at the given price point. There's lots to improve! If you see any specific behaviors or places the model isn't very good, lmk here or can email me lrobinson at cursor.com.

leerob··on CursorBench 3.1
(I work at Cursor) CursorBench includes many evals from actual engineering tasks from the Cursor team, which include our private codebase. This codebase is held-out from training so models haven't seen it, including Composer.
leerob··on Tell HN: Installing Cursor on iOS irreversibly changes your privacy settings
Will do. On it.
leerob··on Tell HN: Installing Cursor on iOS irreversibly changes your privacy settings
(I work at Cursor) Sorry about this, we should have made this more clear. The new privacy mode is needed because we have to store some state to enable running agents in the cloud. If you don't want to use cloud agents, you can continue using the legacy privacy mode. Currently the mobile app requires this new privacy mode and won't work without it. We're pushing an update right now to make this more clear in app and can help you get reverted back to the legacy version on the support thread.
leerob··on Cursor 3
Glass was a codename while the UI was in early alpha with testers. It redirects to download now because there is no special link anymore. It's just part of Cursor 3 itself.
leerob··on Cursor 3
I'm an engineer at Cursor, can try to clarify questions here.

> I wish they'd keep the old philosophy of letting the developer drive and the agent assist. Even when I'm using AI agents to write code, I still find myself spending most of my time reading and reasoning about code.

We very much still believe this, which is why even in this new interface, you can still view/edit files, do remote SSH, go to definition and use LSPs, etc. It's hard to drive and ship real changes without those things in our opinion, even as agents continue to get better at writing code.

> I'm hoping in this new UI in v3 I can still get that experience (maybe it's just hidden behind a toggle somewhere for power users / not shown off in the marketing materials).

This new interface is a separate window, so if you prefer the Cursor 2 style, that continues to exist (and is also getting better).

leerob··on Cursor Composer 2 is just Kimi K2.5 with RL
We used a Kimi base, with midtraining and RL on top. Going forward, we'll include the base used in our blog posts, that was a miss. Also, the license is through Fireworks: https://x.com/Kimi_Moonshot/status/2035074972943831491
leerob··on Composer 2
Are there other coding benchmarks we should include next time? We included Teminal-Bench 2.0 and SWE-bench Mulitilingual.

We don't plan on reporting SWE-bench Verified, for similar reasons to OpenAI: https://openai.com/index/why-we-no-longer-evaluate-swe-bench...

leerob··on Shall I implement it? No
You can disable this if you want, it's under "Inline Diffs" in the Cursor settings.
leerob··on Cursor Composer 1.5
We've found it to be a strong mix of speed and intelligence. It scores higher than Sonnet 4.5 on Terminal-Bench 2, maybe we will post more on this later.
leerob··on Tell HN: Cursor is appending Co-authored-by: Cursor <cursoragent cursor.com>
There's a setting to turn this off if you prefer (Cursor Settings > Agent > Attribution).
leerob··on What I learned building an opinionated and minimal coding agent
> in particular the extra layer of diff-review of AI changes (red/green) which is not integrated into git

We're making this better very soon! In the coming weeks hopefully.

leerob··on What I learned building an opinionated and minimal coding agent
(I work at Cursor) We have all these! Plan mode with a GUI + ability to edit plans inline. Todos. A tool for asking the user questions, which will be automatically called or you can manually ask for it. Hooks. And you can use Opus or any other models with these.
leerob··on Cursor's latest “browser experiment” implied success without evidence
> The JS engine used a custom JS VM being developed in vendor/ecma-rs as part of the browser, which is a copy of my personal JS parser project vendored to make it easier to commit to.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46650998

leerob··on Cursor's latest “browser experiment” implied success without evidence
Should compile now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46650998
leerob··on Vibe Coding Killed Cursor
Hi. I'm an engineer at Cursor.

> By prioritizing the vibe coding use case, Cursor made itself unusable for full-time SWEs.

This has actually been the opposite direction we're building for. If you are just vibing, building prototypes or throwaway code or whatever, then you don't even need to use an IDE or look at the code. That doesn't really make sense for most people, which is why Cursor has different levels of autonomy you can use it for. Write the code manually, or just autocomplete assistance, or use the agent with guardrails - or use the agent in yolo mode.

> One way to achieve that would be to limit the number of lines seen by an LLM in a single read: read first 100 lines

Cursor uses shell commands like `grep` and `ripgrep`, similar to other coding agents, as well as semantic search (by indexing the codebase). The agent has only been around for a year (pretty wild how fast things have moved) and 8 months or so ago, when models weren't as good, you had to be more careful about how much context you let the agent read. For example, not immediately putting a massive file into the context window and blowing it up. This is basically a solved problem today, more or less, as models and agents are much better are reliably calling tools and only pulling in relevant bits, in Cursor and elsewhere.

> Try to write a prompt in build mode, and then separately first run it in plan mode before switching to build mode. The difference will be night and day.

Agree. Cursor has plan mode, and I generally recommend everyone start with a plan before building anything of significance. Much higher quality context and results.

> Very careful with asking the models to write tests or fix code when some of those tests are failing. If the problem is not trivial, and the model reaches the innate context limit, it might just comment out certain assertions to ensure the test passes.

Agree you have to be careful, but with the latest models (Codex Max / Opus 4.5) this is becoming less of a problem. They're much better now. Starting with TDD actually helps quite a bit.

leerob··on “You should never build a CMS”
It's not about a privacy, but common courtesy. Especially after I gave them a heads up in DM about the post and offered to answer any more questions they had. They said they'd reach back out, then didn't, then posted this publicly? Really strange.
leerob··on “You should never build a CMS”
I would have appreciated if he asked me before using my name in the post. Especially after I intentionally did not mention them by name at all. Was trying to avoid talking about any one company.
leerob··on “You should never build a CMS”
(I wrote the original post) I'm a developer, but you can call me a marketer if you want. I don't think it changes the point of my post.

The point was that bad abstractions can be easily replaced by AI now, and this might work well for some people/companies who were in a similar situation as me. I was not trying to say you don't need a CMS at all. In fact, I recommended most people still use one.

What you describe as an "extremely brittle proprietary system" is working great for us, and that's all that I care about. I don't "love to build software" for the sake of building software. The post is about solving a problem of unnecessary complexity.

leerob··on Cursor 1.7
Indeed, it's using `sandbox-exec`. I'll add this to the docs.
leerob··on Cursor 1.7
(I work at Cursor)

We added usage visibility in the IDE with v1.4: https://cursor.com/changelog/1-4#usage-and-pricing-visibilit.... By default, it only shows when you are close to your limits. You can toggle it to always display in your settings, if you prefer.

Page 1 of 21Next →