I’ve switched to using Kimi 2.5 for all of my personal usage and am far from disappointed.
Aside from being much cheaper than the big names (yes, I’m not running it locally, but like that I could) it just works and isn’t a sycophant. Nice to get coding problems solved without any “That’s a fantastic idea!”/“great point” comments.
At least with Kimi my understanding is that beating benchmarks was a secondary goal to good developer experience.
Just going to echo this. Been using K2.5 in opencode as a switch away from Opus because it was too expensive for the sorts of things I was playing with, and it's been great. There's definitely a bit of learning to get the hang of what sort of prompts to give it and to make sure there's enough documentation in the project for it, but it's remarkably capable once you're in the swing of it.
I’ve switched to using Kimi 2.5 for all of my personal usage and am far from disappointed.
Aside from being much cheaper than the big names (yes, I’m not running it locally, but like that I could) it just works and isn’t a sycophant. Nice to get coding problems solved without any “That’s a fantastic idea!”/“great point” comments.
At least with Kimi my understanding is that beating benchmarks was a secondary goal to good developer experience.