Composer 1 model

[MidnightOak]

Composer 1 is a lot faster than GPT-5 (like 10x from my tests), but I have no idea if it performs as well on complex requests compared to GPT-5.

[sasa786]

I’m quite disappointed of Composer 1 model. At least in C++ it performs really bad compared to Sonnet 4.5. Sonnet 4.5 does everything in one go, for Composer 1 I often have to iterate and iterate again.

[Digit]

I’m a bit puzzled about this statement…

@jrista

So I’m now left with kind of a mess, that I have to manually clean up here, because the model just churned, and iterated, and DID, without considering the implications of what it was doing, or considering it needed more information.

Why do you need to manually clean up?

In situations where a model messes up my code, I either undo the previous prompt or (much less often) revert to the previous commit as needed.

[Cyfine]

The model is good. If a model is fast, usually it’s stupid. If a model is smart, usually it’s slow. Composer might not be the smartest, but it is the smartest among the fast models. I now prefer Composer more than GPT-5 because it got so much done in so little time.

[d_s]

I can see that the quality of work in Auto mode has catastrophically worsened over the past 24 hours, and I suspect that this is the model being used. It doesn’t properly understand context, stops halfway through tasks, ignores the mistakes it makes, and breaks the code with everything it does. Even if you give it clear, direct instructions, it still does things its own way — and inevitably breaks the code.

[leoing]

Auto mode people: grok-code-fast + gpt5-mini(?) are free.

[Someguy]

Primarily fast, quality is perfect for not too complicated tasks or questions/codebase investigations and have gpt5 do the rest.

I get adhd from composer 1 it’s just too d*mn fast

[troehrkasse]

@troehrkasse

Everyone seems to be missing another advantage, which is that Composer 1 can potentially integrate much better with the Cursor IDE. Better tool calling, just smoother operation in general.

I said this, and then my first time trying to use plan mode didn’t go well it created the first iteration of the plan well. But then I asked it to make some changes to the plan, and it couldn’t find the first plan, so it created a duplicate plan with a different file name, said it was done. I pointed out that it hadn’t made the changes to the plan that I requested yet, then it went into a loop of editing the plan 10 times, said it was done, but still nothing was changed.

Gave up and tried again with GPT 4.1 which nailed it on the first try.

I did experiment with Composer 1 with other chats not using plan mode, and was pretty happy with results there. It is indeed blazing fast and did a great job writing code with lots of smaller tasks. It is a bit more eager to make changes than GPT 4.1 which I don’t love. For example from a Laravel project:

• Told it to add a button to a page, which would trigger an Artisan command based on some conditions
• It immediately went above and beyond, creating a new Livewire component instead of just a button as I’d directed
• After reviewing I decided the component approach was a good one, because it made it easier to display some status messages regarding the command execution status.

This is an example where GPT 4.1 would have responded in chat “we should consider doing a component for this, is that ok?” vs Composer 1 just making an executive decision to do it and blazing ahead. Though this seems to be how many models work, and why I’ve stuck with 4.1 for so long.

Though I’ve noticed this problem with a lot of models, as it seems others have…

@jrista

It just DOES. Its goal is to DO, DO, DO, DO, DO. And in DOING, it will plow forward and achieve whatever goal it deems it needs to achieve, no matter how much devastation it has to wreak in order to achieve. This is, IMO, the greatest flaw of all models today: They just DO.

[troehrkasse]

@jrista

I would really love to see this kind of back and forth, conversational approach, integrated into Composer 1. As right now, I’m manually going through and trying to clean up the mess it just made.

This is why I use GPT 4.1. It’s very good about this, but much cheaper than Sonnet 4.5

Also why I aggressively do new Git commits between every chat and sometimes during chats too. You never know when the AI might go haywire with changes and having an easy way to rollback saves a lot of time.

[jrista]

I tried GPT-4.1 earlier on. I never had much luck with it. It also seemed more like it was “bailing” on trying to resolve a task, than actually asking for explicit input or direction like Sonnet 4.5 does. I actually have had the same “I’m just gonna bail” behavior from the GPT-5 models as well. One of the reasons I don’t use them much…

When I was using GPT 4.1, it seemed minimally capable at the best of times. I think a lot of the differences in experiences with models, is that not everyone codes the same way with an agent. Different models I think, may cater to different prompting approaches.

[quantizor]

I get better results with it than grok-code-fast-1. I wish it was a little cheaper, but overall a solid coding model.