[ghshephard]

You absolutely don't. I use all three products. My preference is Claude Code for my personal project. The one at work is kind of sandboxed off - but does have the benefit of an MCP for every enterprise service we have (Kibana, Victoria Metrics, Grafana, Jira, etc...) - which is nice.

Over time - I expect Composer will be cheaper than Opus 4.8 - but the nice thing about Cursor - you can flick between models.

And (this is purely a personal thing) - I really like the extensive collection of "Plans" that cursor tracks - there isn't really a similar thing in Claude Code - but I really like the Claude.AI interface for everything else. It's also a much better general knowledge agent - the Cursor Chat interface isn't as nice.

[gigatexal]

I’m not sure what you’re on about. I had Claude doing swarm engineering using different models. It would write specs that haiku would implement, it would check itself etc etc. with a simple phrase it goes into planning, multi agent mode, and chews on a problem until it’s done. It’s pretty autonomous.

Maybe you haven’t looked deeper into what modern Claude can do?

[ghshephard]

The Different Model approach is where from tasks to task - I can switch from Opus 4.8, GPT 5.5 and (very often) composer 2 at 1/10th the cost.

It's not perfect, btw - to some degree you are at the mercy of which models they support - currently only 27 from Gemini, OpenAI, Anthropic, Grok, and Kimi (Just K2.5) - presumably because they have commercial arrangements with them. The "Bring your own Model" model requires you plunk in your API key - which sucks. And only one at a time.

To the best of my Knowledge, Claude Code only supports one model at a time if it's not one from Anthropic (which will use the the entire suite of Anthropic Models depending on the task) - and you have to override it to a single model with an environment variable at startup - no ability to flick between models from task to task.

Depending on your workflow - you can save 70-90% on costs just by chosing a reasonable model for really extensive tasks that don't require thinking, max context, etc....

[baq]

Different models aren’t subagents - they’re completely orthogonal. I use Gemini subagents for code review in cursor, but mostly use gpt for actual coding.