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The Role & Your Charter1 / 3

2 min lesson

What “state-of-the-art coding agent” means at Cursor

Start at the first move in "What 'state-of-the-art coding agent' means at Cursor" and carry it through to the proof.

Step 1 of 3

“state-of-the-art coding agent” is not an abstraction here. It maps to specific shipped systems and the team's published research describes how they were built. Showing fluency with the actual products is a real differentiator, because most candidates discuss RL in general terms.

Two product surfaces anchor the work and they pose different RL problems.

THE SURFACE RESEARCH OWNS

Interactive diagram. Tab through its regions; each focused region shows its detail in the panel below.

diagram: stack

Top to bottom: research here owns the systems, not just the algorithms.

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Full explanation

Composer 2: base-model selection

Composer 2: base-model selection
Base chosen
A strong open model (reported as Kimi K2.5The open base model Cursor continued-trained into Composer 2 (1T parameters, 32B active, 256K context), chosen mainly for how well it fit Cursor's serving infrastructure. Press Enter for the full definition.)
Scale
~1T total parameters, ~32B active (a sparse MoE)
Why it matters
Training on top of a capable base saves enormous compute vs. pretraining from scratch
The tradeoff
You inherit the base's strengths and its quirks; the RL recipe must work with both

Treat these specifics as reported figures, not gospel - but know the shape of the decision.