Composer 2 is controversial, but my actual experience was solid

I tried Composer 2 properly today, and honestly, if you put all the controversy aside for a second, the model itself is not bad at all.

In fact, my first impression is that it’s a real upgrade over Composer 1 and 1.5. I gave it a pretty solid test. I asked it to build a full-stack Reddit clone and deploy it too.

On the first go, it handled most of the work surprisingly well. The deployment also worked, which was a good sign. The main thing that broke was authentication.

Then on the second prompt, I asked it to fix that, and it actually fixed the auth issue and redeployed the app.

That said, it was not perfect. There were still some backend issues left that it could not fully solve. So I would not say it is at the level of Claude Opus 4.6 or GPT-5.4 for coding quality.

But speed-wise, it felt much faster. For me, it was around 5 to 7x faster than Opus 4.6 / GPT-5.4 in actual workflow, and it also feels much more cost-effective.

That combination matters a lot.

Because even if the raw coding quality is still below Opus 4.6 / GPT-5.4, the overall experience was smoother than I expected. It gets you from idea to working product much faster, and for a lot of people that tradeoff will be worth it.

My current take is:

• Better than Composer 1 / 1.5 by a clear margin
• Fast enough to change how often I’d use it
• Good at getting most of the app done quickly
• Still weak enough in backend reliability that I would not fully trust it yet for complex production work
• Not as strong as Opus 4.6 / GPT-5.4 in coding depth, but still very usable

So yeah, I agree with the criticism that it is not on the same level as Opus 4.6 / GPT-5.4 for hard-coding tasks. ( may be because the base model is Kimi K2.5)

But I also think some people are dismissing it too quickly. If you judge it as a fast, cheaper, improved Composer, it is genuinely solid.

I shared a longer breakdown here with the exact build flow, where it got things right, and where it still fell short, in case anyone wants more context