Kimi K2.6: Advancing open-source coding

Accessed via OpenRouter, this one decided to wrap the SVG pelican in HTML with controls for the animation speed: https://gisthost.github.io/?ecaad98efe0f747e27bc0e0ebc669e94...

Transcript and HTML here: https://gist.github.com/simonw/ecaad98efe0f747e27bc0e0ebc669...

There is some humor in the fact that china (of all countries) is pioneering possibly the world's most important tech via open source, while we (US) are doing the exact opposite.

I've always been surprised Kimi doesn't get more attention than it does. It's always stood out to me in terms of creativity, quality... has been my favorite model for awhile (but I'm far from an authority)

I often wonder if in the future, the same way early computers used to take up an entire room but now fit in your pocket, if in the future the equivalent of a data center will be a single physical device like a phone nowadays. And if that’s the case, would it happen much quicker since technology has been speeding up year by year?

Added support for Kimi in https://github.com/raine/claude-code-proxy and it does appear to work surprisingly well with Claude Code, although the usage limit for the entry tier doesn't seem as generous as I'd have expected.

Has anyone here used Kimi for actual work?

I tried it once, although it looks amazing on benchmarks, my experience was just okay-ish.

On the other hand, Qwen 3.6 is really good. It’s still not close to Opus, but it’s easily on par with Sonnet.

Wow, if the benchmarks checkout with the vibes, this could almost be like a Deepseek moment with Chinese AI now being neck and neck with SOTA US lab made models

In my tests[0] it does only slightly better than Kimi K2.5.

Kimi K2.6 seems to struggle most with puzzle/domain-specific and trick-style exactness tasks, where it shows frequent instruction misses and wrong-answer failures.

It is probably a great coding model, but a bit less intelligent overall than SOTAs

[0]: https://aibenchy.com/compare/moonshotai-kimi-k2-6-medium/moo...