SWE-1.7 Reach Near GPT 5.5 and Opus Intelligence

(cognition.com)

89 points | by mekpro 2 hours ago ago

58 comments

  • pants2 an hour ago

    Kinda funny that their "cost-vs-performance" chart looks the same as the one for Composer 2.5[1], except that it includes Composer 2.5 at a completely different spot.

    What are the chances that CursorBench ranks Cursor's model highest, and Cognition's bench ranks Cognition's model highest? Both are to be RL'd from Kimi as a base model, BTW.

    I'd posit that it's not deliberate deception, but for both companies their training data and benchmarks come from the same dataset (Devin/Cursor interaction logs) so they naturally overfit.

    1. https://cursor.com/blog/composer-2-5

  • Mitchem 7 minutes ago

    While I am skeptical of the results here, I am very excited for this new trend of making models faster. Running capable models at 1k TPS is more valuable for me than running better models at 30 TPS. I can only imagine the trend continues to move from "let's only make models smarter" to just incremental intelligence gains but with step improvements in speed.

  • ryandvm an hour ago

    Okay, let's give software engineers a break for a bit and focus on obsoleting other high-linguistic context occupations.

  • yousif_123123 an hour ago

    We need more models that optimize for coding and that can be cheaper than frontier models, like what SWE 1.7 and composer 2.5 are trying to do. I don't think there's an effort to make something GLM-5.2 level but focused only on coding.

    • jstummbillig 7 minutes ago

      Defining what "coding" means now, and how quickly we fall off the capability cliff seems increasingly important.

      Today my "coding" sessions often enough begin with real life problems, where I discuss domain or inter-domain things, ranging from business, economics, psychology, etc. Being able to do all of that with one model is something I am willing to pay a premium for.

      Of course not having to pay the premium, because the routing is smart or whatever, would work just the same for me. I just would not want to have to think about it.

    • UncleOxidant an hour ago

      Qwen was doing something like this with their coder models. But alas, they seem not to be releasing those anymore. Last one was Qwen3-coder-next.

      • yousif_123123 34 minutes ago

        Its crazy that OpenAI and Anthropic themselves aren't doing that. No attempts at reducing inference cost for code as far as I know from them.

      • gsibble 33 minutes ago

        I use this model. It's pretty good but not Opus 4.8 or Fable levels obviously. I'm really hoping we get more models like it (and better) soon. I run it locally and it's great that way.

        • UncleOxidant 22 minutes ago

          Qwen3-coder-next is very usable. But I don't think it's as good as Qwen3.7-27B (though it does run faster on my hardware). It would be great if we could get a Qwen3.7-coder, but I'm not going to hold my breath.

  • akshaydeshraj 8 minutes ago

    Would have been worth a consideration if it could have been used beyond it's own harness. Unfortunately, doesn't seem to be the case.

    https://x.com/theodormarcu/status/2074896486047834380

  • taf2 an hour ago

    Not finding anything about this while searching huggingface: https://huggingface.co/search/full-text?q=SWE-1.7 i assume this is another closed source model?

    • joecot 3 minutes ago

      Yes, and not only that but you can't even access it via API, you can only use it in Devin (formerly Windsurf).

      I'm an OpenCode user, but I'll fall back to Claude Code if I want to use Opus end to end for something, given my company has a subscription. But I'm not using yet another tool and subscription for a model that isn't even winning.

    • mirekrusin 36 minutes ago

      Open weight models should have GPL-like license where it says if you train model on it, it needs to be open weight as well.

  • harmonic18374 an hour ago

    A company whose first demo was completely fraudulent announces that its model beats GPT-5.5, on its own benchmark? I’m gonna wait a little before I trust this.

    This whole company seems to optimize for raising money and impressing VCs. Lying about their products, ignoring consumer market to target enterprise, bragging about how they work their employees like slaves, and writing these posts full of intimidating technical jargon...

    • achandra03 30 minutes ago

      To be fair it does seem like most AI startups are now like this (particularly when it comes to constantly mentioning how hard they work and ignoring consumer markets).

      • parineum 22 minutes ago

        > it does seem like most AI startups are now like this

        Remember when AGI was going to replace all jobs in 6 months? It's always been like that.

    • SubiculumCode an hour ago

      Link for this?

      • jeffnv an hour ago
        • andy99 an hour ago

          Is it just me or does all that* seem pretty tame by today’s standards? Not saying it’s right, but it barely raises eyebrows. Sounds like a pretty typical startup demo.

          * Based on the first comment in the link that claims to summarize the video.

    • oa335 an hour ago

      > "A company whose first demo was completely fraudulent"

      Could you expand on this?

    • giancarlostoro an hour ago

      Would love to see these companies use benchmarks done by third parties.

      • anthonypasq an hour ago

        they are right there? it shows swe-bench multilingual and terminal bench

    • w4yai an hour ago

      What happened ?

    • haritha1313 42 minutes ago

      Their product has far evolved beyond this (of course with the large amount of money being poured into it) and is now used by a lot of traditional companies (banks etc). Also the SWE models were originally built by Windsurf and this seems to be on top of that (after acquisition) although the original SWE-1 models weren't that groundbreaking.

  • nibbleyou an hour ago

    Unrelated: what's the point of "*equal contribution"? Why would someone specify this

    • edot an hour ago

      Because papers are often referred to by the first author’s name, and often the first author is the primary researcher and therefore deserves the extra credit. When two or more primary authors are equally involved, they’ll often do a random ordering but annotate this so that no one thinks one did more than the others.

  • spate141 40 minutes ago

    Feels like they discovers that if you build your own benchmark, you can win it

    • londons_explore 33 minutes ago

      Pretty sure most benchmarks are being gamed by people training on the test set deliberately or accidentally anyway.

  • throwaw12 an hour ago

    Open source for the win!

    Imagine how far community might have pushed if 2 past versions of 'morally superior' Anthropic and 'completely Open AI' open sourced their models for the community to build on top of them

    • akshaydeshraj 10 minutes ago

      Not open source. Also, not available beyond it's own harness.

    • spott an hour ago

      Is this open source? I can't find a link to download the weights.

      • UncleOxidant an hour ago

        It's based on an open weight model (Kimi 2.7) so shouldn't it also be open weight?

        • NitpickLawyer 12 minutes ago

          > so shouldn't it also be open weight?

          Should as in "would it be nice?" - yeah. Should as in they have to? No.

          > Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so

          You can do pretty much anything you want with an MIT license.

        • andy99 43 minutes ago

          There is no obligation to do that. I think the landscape would be very different now if one of the big labs had released an earlier “frontier” model under copyleft that requires sharing fine tunes. I hope it still happens.

  • fallinditch an hour ago

    I'm looking forward to trying this out. I've been using SWE 1.6 quite a lot for grunt work alongside Opus for higher level planning and tricky stuff - a good combo.

    As a (former) Windsurf user I'm pretty happy with the progress of the Cognition/Devin ecosystem after they took over Windsurf, now known as Devin Desktop.

  • hedgehog an hour ago

    Heads up to anyone else curious, I installed the Devin CLI and SWE-1.7 is not currently available there.

  • petesergeant 12 minutes ago

    I think showing the API prices for competitors that people don't really pay for that way is all that useful. I do like that it's provisioned by Cerebras though. I think I'd have leant towards focusing on the TPS.

  • llmslave an hour ago

    These models are never as good, the benchmarks dont tell the full story

    • haritha1313 39 minutes ago

      The reality is most people building their own models and providing that alongside SOTA ones don't really care about how great these models are. They just prove that 'hey we are smart enough to build our own models so you can trust us instead of going with a single provider like Claude via Claude Code', also a cheap alternative for cost sensitive/free users - at least this was the case for Windsurf, not sure if Devin Desktop still has that tier. They just need to hillclimb the benchmarks and show something reasonable enough there.

    • spate141 38 minutes ago

      Benchmarks are just vibes with error bars... wake me up when it survives a week on a real codebase without hallucinating a package that doesn't exist.

    • SubiculumCode an hour ago

      Funny, the cheerleading at HN for leading Chinese models, but a non Chinese lab (building on top of a Chinese model) gets dissed here.

      • mirekrusin 32 minutes ago

        It's simple: close weights = not welcome.

      • sosodev an hour ago

        It's almost as if HN users aren't all the same.

      • llmslave an hour ago

        all the open source models are a waste of time relative to the bleeding edge from openai/anthropic

        • wongarsu an hour ago

          At work I wouldn't want to use anything else. Compared to my salary a Claude subscription (or two) is cheap

          For hobby projects I've completely switched to DeepSeek v4 pro. I spend less than on a $10 Claude plan and am not subjected to quota limits (when I have time and motivation, the last thing I want is a 5 hour quota running out). And the difference in model performance is fine for those smaller projects, most of which will end up abandoned or in a state of "good enough" anyways

          And for utility tasks, those 30b models are also great. I'm a big fan of gemma4

          • llmslave 41 minutes ago

            ive just got better things to do with my life than fuss with an inferior model. its like why hire a dumb employee over a smart one

        • pixel_popping an hour ago

          Not true since a few months, genuinely try GLM 5.2 and Minimax M3, especially in adversarial/gating... as a general model, I can agree, but as a coding model, they are not bad, comparable to maybe Opus 4.5 in real usage which is quite impressive.

          • villish 15 minutes ago

            I use GLM or DS4 to help me draft a better initial prompt with more information that I then give to Sonnet 5/Fable/GPT5.5. While benchmarks show the open models close to frontier level, my experience with them is drastically different. I have high confidence that Fable or GPT will 1 shot solutions.

            At least with low level programming languages. They're all very good for webdev stuff.

          • llmslave 38 minutes ago

            yeah but why waste your time on these models, just use the one that gets the better results

            • nicoburns 30 minutes ago

              I actively prefer GLM-5.2 for some tasks. For simple tasks the results are just as good as e.g. Opus, and it produces results significantly faster.

            • 9183726518 33 minutes ago

              Because you can get them from more trustworthy providers or with hardware encryption.

              • llmslave 23 minutes ago

                i trust anthropic/openai with my data far more than some random startup.

            • somenameforme 33 minutes ago

              I was going to respond until I saw your account name lol.

  • achierius an hour ago

    I've always had mixed feelings about Cognition. Obviously they have some very, very smart people working there (I even know a few), and they do make real products. But at the same time, they've made suspicious marketing claims more than once and even been caught making outright fabricated ones; and while they certainly seem to have shaped up from that, I still find their claims to be in a sort of grey area where they seem to avoid unfavorable comparisons and lean on their own benchmarks. Certainly when I've tried their models they have not been nearly as useful as comparable versions of Claude, GLM, etc. -- though I haven't had a chance to try SWE-1.7 yet.