This is the cursor callout.

Don't make us shame you into disclosure

Cursor had a specific licensing agreement that allowed them to brand it how they want.

> Cursor had a specific licensing agreement...

Cursor had an "agreement" with Fireworks.ai, which apparently allowed them to RL Composer 2 atop Kimi Base 2.5 without attribution: https://x.com/Kimi_Moonshot/status/2035074972943831491 / https://archive.vn/CcdkI

Composer 2 performed differently on evals than Moonshot.ai's coding models: Cursor claims theirs is better than Claude Opus 4.6: https://x.com/fynnso/status/2034706304875602030 / https://archive.vn/bVtik. And, per Lee Robinson (Cursor employee), it is very likely Cursor builds its own foundational model for Composer 3.

Wasn't the end of that story that Cursor had a non-disclosure licence, so they had not done anything wrong towards Moonshot?

Moonshot licenced it to Fireworks AI who licenced it to Cursor.

Ah is that what it is? I don't use Cursor, never saw it as being relevant to me, but would not surprise me.

Cursor's composer models are finetuned kimi

They are unusable (unless you want to deliberately destroy your codebase). So if Cursor's models are Kimi based, then well. I'll skip them altogether.

Kimi works great in their CLI, but their CLI has a number of workarounds for quirks of their models, including detecting when the model gets into a loop, and reverting to a checkpoint but letting the model compose a "message" to its past self (search their CLI for "BackToTheFuture"...) It doesn't work so well in a harness that doesn't take those quirks into account.

I'm using Composer extensively, and it works great for me. Your experiences are not universal.

They are far from unusable. They aork great for 80-90% of a typical full stack dev. Alot less useful for more noche stuff

I wouldn't skip at least testing the original. Model distilling done by Cursor could be the culprit.

Composer is really good, but just like any Chinese model it needs a good plan. It's cheap and fast, in 1 month of pro I used the equivalent of 500$ in API credit for it.

Composer 1.x was poor. The new one is a totally different beast and absolutely fine for day to day.

They're not unusable, they're just bad when compared with all the real frontier models.

I only use composer 2.5 day to day and it works fine with human review.

Shaming others when all AI is trained off scraped content and code huh? Many of those sources either breaking ToS or being illegal, such as Anna’s Archive. Bold move. And Chinese models in particular have been accused of distilling off American models.

Don’t you know there’s no honor among thieves?

> they asked you to 'advertise' them basically.

To be clear, the “advertising” clause just requires you to disclose that you use the thing somewhere in the product, such as credits in an “About” section.

I all it advertising clause, because I remember still in the 2000s seeing an Apple ad which at the end of it showed "Unix" or something like that on it, and I remembered that was one of the BSD license requirements, or maybe Apple just did it also just to proudly boast using Unix.

Hmm… I may be confusing the following clause from the “new” BSD license with the advertising clause from the original BSD license.

> 2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.

The 2-clause BSD license omits even that.

They were definitely proudly boasting being a certified UNIX OS (and macOS still is), it goes deeper than just software licenses: https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/

It seems tacked on pretty quickly - I would have expected they try a little more legalese regarding what counts as a "user interface".