For lighter interactive agentic coding, where you type stuff into an IDE and a minute or three later get results back for review, composer 2.5 is honestly pretty great. The results get notably worse for larger tasks though.

Agreed. It’s worse than Opus of course. But Opus takes more than 10x longer to give you something to look at. I’m not kidding, I “benchmarked” a real ticket I was working on. Opus 4.7 took more than 30min. Opus 4.8 took over an hour. Composer 2.5 took 5min on the exact same prompt & local setup. My subjective review is that composer’s code was only like 10-20% worse. It still worked, it was just a bit less clean and a little more hacky. But it’s not like Opus is flawless either. At the end of the day, if it takes an hour to get to draft code I can look at and iterate on… that’s fucking impossible for me. Unless it did an excellent job. But as long as I still need to review and follow up with changes, Opus is just too slow. It’s really frustrating because it’s a lot slower than it was 6mo ago, and not noticeably better. Fable seems a step in the right direction but is $$$$