Vibe Check: Cursor 2.0 and Composer 1 Alpha

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At Every, we measure excitement for a new AI product by the velocity of messages in our #early-access channel on Discord.

We got early access to Cursor 2.0—a new version of the OG AI code editor—a week ago, and the vibes were…polite. People were curious, interested, but not exactly fired up. Then, less than 24 hours ago, we got our hands on the new LLM Cursor also released today, and the group chat has been popping off. The excitement for the new model seems to be rubbing off on the code editor as well.

What’s new

Cursor launched two things today:

Cursor 2.0: A refreshed version of its AI code editor, with a push to add more of the primitives of command line interfaces (CLIs, or the text-based tools developers use to type commands directly, rather than clicking around in a graphical editor) like Claude Code directly into the interface. Cursor 2.0 includes a new agent view where you can spin up and manage agents in a three-panel layout: agent status on the left, AI thought process in the middle, code on the right. (It resembles an inbox of sorts, reminiscent of Codex on the web; we dig into this interface more below.)

Composer 1 Alpha: Cursor’s very own LLM that is, indeed, as my colleagues said, very, very fast. The model is available inside Cursor 2.0 as well as its CLI. It will cost the same as GPT-5 (which, as we noted in our GPT-5 Vibe Check, is priced to make rivals sweat: GPT-5-mini undercuts Google’s Gemini 2.5 Flash, and GPT-5 Standard comes in at one-twelfth the cost of Claude 4 Opus).

Our day-zero verdict:

Cursor 2.0 is a solid evolution of the integrated development environment (IDE) experience for 2025: Its agent view prioritizes what programmers actually spend time on (delegating to and managing agents) rather than reading and writing code by hand. It also has a lot of bells and whistles—like the ability to put multiple models on the same problem simultaneously and an integrated web browser so AI can test out its code end-to-end. But because Cursor 2.0 can do anything, it feels overwhelming, and if you’re coming back from using a CLI, it’s going to feel hard to use.

Composer 1 Alpha is fast, capable, and genuinely fun to use—but inside Cursor 2.0, it feels limited by how cluttered the interface feels. The fact that Cursor has its own model though makes Cursor genuinely interesting again, and we’ll keep coming back to see how it improves over time.

Build a project in a single day

AI can feel abstract until you build something real—and tools “made for programmers” can stop you before you start. Spend one day with Every’s Dan Shipper to get acquainted with the best tools on the market, assign your AI agents real tasks, and ship something live. Claude Code for Beginners runs Nov. 19, live on Zoom. You’ll leave with a project, a reusable workflow, and a head start on building the agentic apps that will populate the future.

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The Reach Test

Dan Shipper, the multi-threaded CEO

Become a paid subscriber to Every to unlock this piece and learn about:

1. The results of the Reach Test from Dan Shipper, Kieran Klaassen, and Audrey Galko
2. Code editor’ two conflicting visions crammed into one interface
3. How the model solves the speed problem, even if less smart
4. From “Q1 2025 energy” skepticism to genuine intrigue