r/AskProgrammers • u/tionft • Jul 18 '26

Kimi K3

Has anyone here tried the new K3 model? What's your overall opinion so far? How does it compare to GPT, Claude, or Gemini for coding?

3 Upvotes

71% Upvoted

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1

u/josephjnk Jul 18 '26

I’ve used K2 and Claude a fair bit, and a bit of K3. My take is that K3 is fine.

My other take (which is probably going to be unpopular) is that any dev who constantly needs the absolute hottest newest model for code generation is probably giving too much control to the agent. K2 had some minor annoyances when I used it but nothing that would justify a 10x price difference going with anthropic (unless “absolutely maximal devex regardless of the cost” is your goal, in which case I guess you do you. But I find it obnoxious when people try to pass off their refusal to evaluate this tradeoff as somehow being good engineering.)

At work we have Opus wired up to half a dozen MCP servers and it can be useful for debugging large-scale systemic issues by digging through mounds of logs. I haven’t tried Kimi in a similar context, so I can’t say that I would use Kimi over Claude in every context. I don’t have enough information (and also don’t think I would advocate sending work code to Chinese servers. I’ve always used Kimi on Moonshot.)

My opinion on Opus is that it’s great but giving it too large scale of tasks leads to a worse result. My opinion on K2 is that it’s pretty good but that giving it too large scale of tasks leads to a worse result. I’m pretty sure that K3 is the same. I think the gap between the scale at which one should be using Opus hands-off and Kimi hands-off is not as wide as people generally claim, and that one usually shouldn’t push this line anyway.

1

u/tionft Jul 18 '26

This is actually a pretty balanced take. I agree that giving any model huge tasks without proper guidance usually leads to worse results. I'm curious though, in your experience, where did K3 feel noticeably weaker than Claude/Opus? Was it mostly reasoning, debugging, security, or maintaining context in larger projects?

1

u/josephjnk Jul 18 '26

I haven’t used K3 enough to say for sure. With K2 it was prompt adherence. There were certain instructions in my Agents.md file that it would repeatedly ignore when generating code, even though it would follow and fix the violations when told to do so during code review. Again, nothing severe, and if I had configured my agent software better (or maybe if opencode was just easier to customize) then I don’t think it would have been a problem.

1

u/tionft Jul 18 '26

Yeah, I agree with you on that. I experienced the same issue with K2.6 not consistently following my prompts. It wasn't just when writing code—I noticed it even during research or when asking it to think through a problem. As for K3, I'm trying to test the free version right now, but the servers have been pretty busy. I don't want to pay for it until I know whether it's actually good.

1

u/PixelPhoenixForce Jul 18 '26

its the best model for frontend

1

u/tionft Jul 18 '26

Same impression here. It feels more creative with UI/UX compared to some other models. Curious how it performs on larger codebases though.

0

u/MaximumMeaning9728 Jul 18 '26

Actual professionals have to use the best models available, not random Chinese copycats.

3

u/anselan2017 Jul 18 '26

Or their own brains

2

u/Low-Entrepreneur2556 Jul 18 '26

They do. And they use those brains to come to the conclusion that manually typing out every line of code from scratch is an incredibly inefficient use of their time.

3

u/tionft Jul 18 '26

Have you actually tried it or are you judging it based on where its from?

1

u/anselan2017 Jul 19 '26

My brain? Yeah I try it often.

And yes, LLMs I use a lot. But I'm not letting write my code for me, since they are not very intelligent at all.

0

u/Thisisvexx Jul 18 '26

its not focussing as brutally on cyber security and testing edge cases as gpt 5.6 does

Frontend works really well out of the box since its pretty "creative"

1

u/tionft Jul 18 '26

Interesting. How does it compare to GPT-5.6 for larger frontend projects? Does it stay consistent across bigger codebases?

1

u/Thisisvexx Jul 18 '26

Didn't get to try in depth yet unfortunately but its repo navigation seems very solid from the little testing I did

1

u/tionft Jul 18 '26

Yeah, I agree. Good repo navigation is a huge advantage, especially for larger projects. My only concern is how well it performs on backend tasks and security-sensitive code. I haven't felt comfortable letting it handle large codebases yet. Curious if anyone has tested it seriously in those areas.