2 min lesson
Plan with a smart model, execute with a fast one
Describe what "The single most common question support fields is which model to pick" changes in practice.
Step 1 of 2
Plan with a smart model, execute with a fast one
Plan modeA mode that makes no edits: it researches the codebase and produces an editable plan you review before any code changes. Press Enter for the full definition. has the agent write a detailed Markdown plan of exactly what it will do instead of editing files immediately. Coach users to plan with a frontier reasoning model, today Claude Opus 5.5Anthropic's top Opus-tier model in Cursor at $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output, 20% below Claude Opus 5, which it replaces. Press Enter for the full definition. or the GPT-5.x line, then switch to a fast in-house model like ComposerCursor's own fast coding model, tuned for the editor and priced well below frontier models; the recommended day-to-day model for executing a plan. Press Enter for the full definition. to execute. Name the pattern, not the generation: the picker turns over every few months.
If a user complains that Agent runs feel slow on big tasks, point them at this split before anything else.
"Plan with a frontier model so the agent writes out exactly what it'll do, then switch the model to ComposerCursor's own fast coding model, tuned for the editor and priced well below frontier models; the recommended day-to-day model for executing a plan. Press Enter for the full definition. to execute. Composer has enough context and juice to run the plan well, and because all the thinking is done up front, you're just buying speed."
The single most common question support fields is which model to pick. The honest answer is to let the user determine it for themselves: Best-of-N runs the same prompt with the same inputs across several models in parallel so you can compare the outputs side by side.
You can even run one model twice to see the variance from the same prompt, which tends to surprise people. There's an upfront cost to running a prompt redundantly, but it's far cheaper than going down a rabbit hole with the wrong model and redoing the whole task.
Interactive widget. Tab through its controls; the result updates in the panel below as you change them.
Auto picks a model when you're unsure, and Best-of-N settles ties by running several in parallel.