Good, coding harnesses should be open source and LLMs should be treated as commodities. Minimize switching costs for consumers, and let people understand how they're interacting with the context and the LLM outputs.<p>The industry has been moving the wrong direction with Claude Code staying closed (despite multiple times leaking the source code!) and the open source Gemini CLI being deprecated in favor of closed source Antigravity CLI.
Why would a company do any of these things? What is their motivation for any of it? That’s like saying cloud providers should be commodity and should open source all of their platforms and eliminate egress fees so customers can easily leave at any point in time.<p>That’s a charity, not a business model.
On the question of language models and periphery tooling -<p>Open weight models are disruptive to the business models of closed model businesses. An incentive is if your business is built around X but model training is helpful to you, but you don’t expect to meter it specifically. You can release your models and undercut the exclusive moat of a new model company like OpenAI or Anthropic from becoming at some point a competitor, or holding their access as a chip in pricing negotiations. By opening your architectures and weights other competitors can build on them and newer better models emerge faster decoupled from a small number of proprietary models. This lets you focus on X while gaining overall momentum on your model release at no additional cost and no loss in focus on X, while defending against upstarts and monopolies.<p>This is effectively a lot of the open source world that comes from corporate development as well. It feels odd after this many decades of discussing corporate reasons to participate in open source we keep rehashing it.
Maybe these things should be utilities that can be swapped out at will and shouldn’t even be privately owned at all? Heresy, I know!
Because there is literally nothing special about coding hardnesses. The models are doing all the lifting. It just user experience that separates them.<p>A coding hardness with just bash outperforms Codex, Claude Code, OpenCode, Pi ect. The added features are just user experience features.
Try Kimi in Kimi CLI and Claude Code and try saying that again. Kimi quickly collapses into tool calling loops without measures in their CLI but not in Claude Code and is largely useless for any long running tasks in harnesses not taking this into account.<p>With those measures (which are actually quite interesting) it can at times perform at Sonnet level.
If harnesses are basically doing nothing, why would these metrics vary so widely?<p><a href="https://www.endorlabs.com/research/ai-code-security-benchmark" rel="nofollow">https://www.endorlabs.com/research/ai-code-security-benchmar...</a><p>There's a lot of ways to configure agents and any implicit configuration to harnesses may have a non-trivial effect.
A harness(notice the lack of a 'd') is a strap system to gain control over something.<p>Like the thing people attach a dog lead to so that their kids won't just go kamikaze into a car.<p>Coding harnesses are named by analogy to that.<p>They are not hard.
The reason I have a dog harness is to distributes weight so I don't choke her when she goes at the other dog that she doesn't like. I'm actually puzzling over kids kamikazeing into cars
It is a common fear for parents. Obviously they are not fighting for the emperor but chasing or running away from something.<p>The strapped kids are often normal with no apparent disabilities(but it is possible they have an ADHD diagnosis).<p>Never thought about doing it to my own.
It's actually only a problem if it's the other way around, isn't it?<p>If kids run into a car, they will most probably just bounce and continue, perhaps inflicting some minor damage. But if a car mows down a kid, that could well be a fatal injury. Leashes for all the cars! ;)
You got to miss spell these days or people assume your ai :)
Your reply doesn't answer the question: What is their motivation for any of it?
I would disagree here.<p>Building a good and working coding harness with smaller models is really hard. Everything evolves around the limited context size.<p>Tools must be specification driven to reduce noise and high temp hallucinations, tool call shrinking needs to remove errors and tryouts of different formats of parameters (because LLMs always ignore descriptions in the JSON...), and you have to deal with long running agents because you can't afford them. Planner/orchestrator architecture, agent to agent communication need to be summarized, and then you have the messed up scheduling parts, because you need to prioritize short running agents and give the planner a tool to wait for outputs of spawned contractor agents.<p>And that's not even talking about sandbox vs playground read/write/access policies of tools.<p>Harness engineering, if done correctly, is quite hard.<p>And all of this works 60% of the time, every time.<p>Anyways, that was somewhat the summary of the last 6 months building my exocomp agentic environment. And it's still not satisfying to work with.
Because they steal everything to train their models. They literally make you pay for the "commons" knowledge
Cloud providers are commodity, and egress pricing is partially cost following because they have to pay peering to their interconnect points for WAN. Internal networks are not charged within the account because the economics of the VPC overlay are optimized for that use, but inter account and VPC and other boundaries carry cost - especially interconnection between accounts because the way VPC treats virtualization requires a relatively expensive routing. Inter AZ and inter region pricing also exists for the same cost following reasons. They also help shape incentives because it allows them to optimize placement of compute within the same AZ to physical buildings or rings.<p>The case that is largely nonsense is the egress pricing on direct connects since beyond the circuit costs, which the customer pay, there’s no costs for aws not already on the customer regardless. It also makes DC friction weird in that you are incentivized to NOT move storage before compute.
> cloud providers should be commodity<p>They are already.<p>> and should open source all of their platforms<p>Most of the cloud platforms are open source. Linux, container, k8s… it’s entirely possible for someone to build and deploy their private cloud if they have the resources.<p>> and eliminate egress fees<p>What does it mean? If I sign up for cloud service I am only bound to the contract terms. If I am PAYGO I can switch anytime.
> Most of the cloud platforms are open source. Linux, container, k8s…<p>Linux isn't a cloud platform and neither is Docker.<p>Kubernetes was created specifically to create a way in against AWS' de facto public cloud monopoly. The Cloud Native Compute Foundation is a classic "alliance of smaller players uses open-source and interoperability as a wedge against an incumbent that threatens hegemony".<p>> it’s entirely possible for someone to build and deploy their private cloud if they have the resources.<p>What is there for that, really? Basically just OpenStack?
> <i>That’s a charity, not a business model.</i><p><pre><code> Joel Spolsky in 2002 identified a major pattern in technology business & economics: The pattern of "commoditizing your complement", an alternative to vertical integration, where companies seek to secure a choke point or quasi-monopoly in products composed of many necessary & sufficient layers by dominating one layer while fostering so much competition in another layer above or below its layer that no competing monopolist can emerge, prices are driven down to marginal costs elsewhere in the stack, total price drops & increases demand, and the majority of the consumer surplus of the final product can be diverted to the quasi-monopolist.
No matter how valuable the original may be and how much one could charge for it, it can be more valuable to make it free if it increases profits elsewhere.
This pattern explains many otherwise odd or apparently self-sabotaging ventures by large tech companies into apparently irrelevant fields, such as the high rate of releasing open-source contributions by many Internet companies or the intrusion of advertising companies into smartphone manufacturing & web browser development & statistical software & fiber-optic networks & municipal WiFi & radio spectrum auctions & DNS: they are pre-emptive attempts to commodify another company elsewhere in the stack, or defenses against it being done to them.
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<a href="https://gwern.net/complement" rel="nofollow">https://gwern.net/complement</a>
Here's the Spolsky article, called "Strategy Letter V": <a href="https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/" rel="nofollow">https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/</a><p>Here's links to the whole series up to VI: <a href="https://lettersremain.com/joel-spolsky-on-strategy/" rel="nofollow">https://lettersremain.com/joel-spolsky-on-strategy/</a>
"Commoditizing your complement" is a convenient market phenomenon when it happens, but it's not a hard rule that everything that <i>should</i> be a commodity lands in the window of incentives that result in this strategy being the self-serving optimum for a company. Usage of "should" here can be interpreted as "would be most beneficial to the largest number of people in terms of cumulative productivity" or "not having this be commoditized leads to terrible incentives that harm a lot of people." There's no guarantee at all that it ends up being most profitable to individual market actors to attempt to commodify LLM compute, and in fact they seem more interested in securing legal moats and protected monopolies. You may think that reality will force this to fail via open source model releases from China or the like, but consider the world in which the US officially bans import and usage of all but specifically licensed and approved LLMs. The most powerful companies and people here seem broadly aligned on wanting that, so it's not implausible. Sure, you as an individual could illegally import and run an unsanctioned LLM yourself, but most people won't do that, and attempts to scale it would be beaten down with the force of law. The companies who strike deals will get 99+% of business and profit handsomely, no need to ever let their golden goose be commodified. It's a strictly better strategy if your government is dysfunctional enough to let it happen.
> but consider the world in which the US officially bans import and usage of all but specifically licensed and approved LLMs.<p>Then the US will fall behind China and, more importantly, from the rest of the countries in the world who refuse to lobotomize themselves in the manner you described.<p>There are also other cultural and political risks which, although delayed, may easily grow into something apocalyptic. Rich people building bunkers isn't just a fad, the outcome they envision isn't fiction, it might actually be a part of the plan, and while this is concerning it does make everything simpler.
I don't really see how this applies to Anthropic. Claude Code _is_ their integral money maker. Their point above is a three-way neck-to-neck competition where they won't be able to become a near-monopoly any time soon.
> it can be more valuable to make it free if it increases profits elsewhere.<p>That's a big "if" for Claude Code, et al.
The cloud provider isn't the harness, Terraform/OpenTofu/Pelumi and the abstractions you build using them are. The cloud provider is the LLM. It's not as fungible as the LLM and there's no direct comparison to egress costs of course, but that's moreso a problem with the metaphor.
Because Claude Code is literally nothing particularly special. We don't need their business model. <i>They</i> need their business model, and to that I say, tough shit.
The familiar Chinese recipe for success: Always copy and imitate first, even if it is inferior, always make it cheaper or even free so that the original innovator will be burdened by brutal price competition and much bigger R&D costs and cannot keep up in the long run. Then the copycat will win in the endgame.
Well, until you established monopoly you need to build trust. Open Source is one way of doing just that. One of the better ways I would say even...
Public good isn’t a charity, and a business model that doesn’t contribute to the public good should not be allowed to exist.
Do you think Internet Explorer 6.0 was a good decision?
There is a difference between a loss leader that drives a monopoly. Microsoft gave away a browser to make their monopoly OS more valuable and deepen their anti competitive moat. They were almost broken up as a result and honestly should have been if we had any anti trust enforcement.<p>How does open sourcing a Claude code clone drive adoption of anything that is a monopoly or even commercially related? Instead it seems like an attempt to undermine US AI companies.<p>That being said I am increasingly skeptical of how the US leaders are converging on creating monopolies and going deeper into the app layer that means they will end up owning everything rather than being the substrate of a competitive and flourishing ecosystem.<p>If it were up to me I would implement a regulation that 1) AI labs can’t own inference hardware, data centers would be a regulated utility like electricity and the internet required to provide open access third party safety, guardrails and audit, 2) inference providers can’t build apps beyond serving API requests 3) training data sets are required to be open sourced within 3 years of training a model.<p>What we are doing now is allowing vertical and horizontal integration of the hardware, training, inference and application layer. Last time we did that standard oil ended up owning the rail network, pipelines, oil fields, gas stations and refineries. Go see how that worked out for society.
Good will and trust can ultimately have monetary value, and having a funnel based on open source is a viable play if it leads to a service that is sticky.
> Why would a company do any of these things?<p>What? It’s actually insane that they haven’t yet.<p>I don’t like changing tools. What engineer does? I want to learn one tool and tune it to my exact preferences. Proprietary vendor tools are not portable and I avoid them.<p>Either Anthropic or OpenAI could drop the first-to-market open coding harness tomorrow and it would be as big as VSCode, it would be the standard platform everyone builds stuff on.
They did steal all of our written knowledge
The capital motivation isn't the only one that exists. You can say something should be true without having a plan to maximize quarterly revenues.<p>Even if you consider profit motive, what is the profit motive for corporate contributions to open source? The same applies here.
This ^
“A business that does things that customers actually like is a charity” lmao
After 16 years on Hacker News, I've come to associate its readership with cheap bastards who think everything should be free while simultaneously wanting to keep their 6-figure jobs.<p>There's a very strong overlap with male gamers, who also think everything involving sophisticated engineering and design should be cheaper than a cup of coffee.<p>Just call it out and maybe we can collectively choose to towards a culture that doesn't encourage such shameless behavior or perverted values.
> on Hacker News, I've come to associate its readership with cheap bastards<p>They might be cheap but they surely aren't stupid. They sure know who not to trust, security beats imaginary profits promised by cheap used-car salesmen who did move software jobs to wherever they could spare a dime.<p>And you want us to defend their current profits which they swear to use for the removal of the remaining software jobs...
If you see this as people just want free stuffs you are missing the point. There is an entire different level of danger to allow a few entities to completely own a day to day technology.<p>Imagine personal computers and open source operating systems completely don’t exist. What you can do on a pc today, you have to always do it on a thin client always connected to a main frame run by a selected few. Everything you do is recorded and subjected to at least 30 days of retention and inspection.<p>Imagine every car is completely not customer serviceable and have to be connected to one of the three manufacturers in order to operate. Everywhere you go is recorded. The manufacturer may decided the place you want to go is inappropriate for you to go.
You’re not totally wrong but I think the motivations are varied. Using myself as an example, I have paid huge sums for software, films, news, and yes open source software, but I hate paying 5 bucks for a sub or buying certain products because the deal just isn’t a fair trade. I’d say most modern software is a bad deal.<p>That said I am a cheap bastard.
I'd gladly pay for software that demonstrates craftsmanship, quality and care for the user. Not a very common phenomenon unfortunately.
Note it is easy to confuse "free" with "paid by advertisements".
The jagged frontier of frontier models means treating tokens as fungible between providers is naive at the limit of capability, but also will work for solved problems far from the boundary. The problem is you need to keep evaluating all models to know where your use case lies on the frontier map.<p>As a concrete example, you’ll get very different results for the same prompt for sonnet, opus, fable, gemini, gpt 5.5, …
ah nevermind it's just a fork of OpenCode
There is really nothing free in terms of money, there are only things really free in term of spirit. But AI coding assistant are not those things related to spiritual freedom.
The complements ARE the LLM AND the harness. The actual products we're all consuming are GPUs. Memory being expensive is a second-order effect.<p>The platform is the GPU, and doing cool shit with it IS the complement, which requires more memory. And demand is so high and will stay high, that it looks like the platform itself.
> And demand is so high and will stay high,<p>The question is why supply is restricted, primarily by sanctions and tariffs to China, and the expressed refusal of RAM makers to even think about increasing supply, they are actually all sweaty about China taking a bit of the unrestricted market.
what do you mean by should?
As much as their propaganda wants us to believe, Anthropic is not 'the industry'.
> MiMoCode is built as a fork of OpenCode. It keeps all core OpenCode capabilities (multiple providers, TUI, LSP, MCP, plugins) and adds persistent memory, intelligent context management, subagent orchestration, goal-driven autonomous loops, compose workflows, and self-improvement via dream/distill.<p>From github
I'm pretty sure most of the comments in this thread are AI bots propping up this product?<p>I tried the free model and it's nowhere near Sonnet 4.6 in terms of capabilities. The fact that token speed will randomly get stuck at 0/s makes sense given it's a free service, but the way it performs is more reminiscent of AI from 2025.
Since the link is in Chinese: MiMo Code is Xiaomi’s AI agentic coding harness.<p>“ MiMoCode is a terminal-native AI coding assistant. It can read and write code, run commands, manage Git, and use a persistent memory system to keep a deep understanding of your project across sessions while continuously improving itself.”<p>GitHub link (English): <a href="https://github.com/XiaomiMiMo/MiMo-Code" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/XiaomiMiMo/MiMo-Code</a><p>@dang might be better to link to the GitHub, and not for language reasons.<p>(Edit: for posterity, original URL as submitted was [0]).<p>[0]: <a href="https://mimo.xiaomi.com/mimocode" rel="nofollow">https://mimo.xiaomi.com/mimocode</a>
What a transformation by Xiaomi to build almost frontier level models. Five years back, when I was in the data science team, they dint really bother about AI models and were using Baidu for NLP and vision under the hood of their APIs
I remember when they made this:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiaomi_Mi_1" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiaomi_Mi_1</a><p>And now they make one of the fastest cars ever created and frontier-level AI. In just over a decade. 你好!
Wrote this eons ago:<p><pre><code> I fully expect Baidu and other tech giants on the Chinese shores to try and push the boundaries of technology. Silicon Valley (and the US) in general has always been the hot-bed of innovation. But with enormous increase in wealth in China (and to an extent in India), I can see these companies being more and more ambitious. Not long ago Andrew Ng of Coursera and Stanford AI Lab fame joined Baidu to further their rival to the 'Google Brain' project.
Xiaomi has long been positioning itself as a company with design chops of Apple, engineering chops of Google, and e-commerce chops of Amazon, all rolled into one-- and I can see where they are coming from. If they manage to pull it off, I guess that's when we'd start seeing the proverbial "Death of Silicon Valley" as in, it loosing its strange monopoly and strangle hold on tech world in terms of both talent and innovation.
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<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9421471">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9421471</a>
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> While Americans Oppose AI Data Centers<p>I know it's more mixed and complex than this, but i think a big opposition is not to the data centers themselves but to their locations. Too often it feels like the centers are exploiting local resources and community infrastructure rather than paying their share or locating themselves in places that are less likely to cause problems to home owners.<p>The whole process feels indifferent or even adversarial at times.
You’d think they’d have the green data center thing down already, but that ain’t going to happen when politicians still boast “clean coal” and moan on about wind farms. It takes real leadership and economic force to transition towards a green economy, therefore you’re going to get pushback while heading toward a brick wall.<p>A good start would be to limit new data center construction to zero-emissions DC-only compute. Slap a ZEDCO badge on it and you’ll get that buy-in you’re looking for.
I think the difference is that many data centers are being built as cheaply as possible, with no regards for noise prevention, their effect on the energy grid, etc. Data centers have been located near people for decades, but most of them are completely inconspicuous because they are designed to mitigate their effect on their surroundings.
Cold storage warehouses, industrial greenhouses, indoor ag, are all similar but who protests those.<p>I think there's something social going on.
Those consume nowhere near as much electricity as data centers.<p>Of course electricity wouldn't be such a problem if US government chose to invest in cheap, sustainable energy sources and upgrade its grid. China is building solar and nuclear like crazy, and that gives them a massive advantage here.<p>Hopefully in future elections Americans choose a candidate and party that isn't bought by the fossil fuel lobby.
No, we will only get to pick between “bought by fossil fuel lobby,” and, “degrowth moron” - case in point Newsom, a serious presidential candidate who is killing off our refineries while not doing enough to make EVs work for common people. You can say that’s a hard problem and takes a ton of time and work, but a responsible politician would not hurt the high percentage of Californians who can’t afford an EV or can’t charge it, by driving out refineries.<p>And Newsom also doesn’t support nuclear, while our electricity prices are already over double most other states.<p>The Democratic Party’s modern strategy about energy seems to be to just throw wrenches into the existing fossil fuel world (because that’s the easy part) and then wag the finger at consumers when they complain. “Well, you gross polluter, you should have just bought a $40,000 EV and a $700,000 house to put $25,000 solar panels on!”<p>To be clear, I’d <i>love</i> to vote for a Democrat who had a real energy policy that replaced dirty energy with clean, and was able to get tons of people into EVs where practical.
industrial greenhouses make noise? I live near Forest Hill, LA, which is where tons of nurseries set up, dozens and dozens. they all have greenhouses. No noise. I bet their electrical connections don't raise prices of local residents, either.<p>So is it the water? I don't know where i sit on the water argument. Equinix near LAX had chillers, i guess, but really it's just massive HVAC. chillers don't work everywhere (my understanding). I don't remember plumes of humidity coming off the facility, either. I also don't remember being able to hear it from outside the building, or even in the foyer before you went through the mancatchers.
Do you know the old anecdote about the russian and american scientists talking about freedom? The one where the american explains that he is free to go and protest against the war in Vietnam and where the russian dismisses him that he is also free to protest against the war in Vietnam.
correct
Xiaomi have been cooking a lot in recent times. Their model, especially the pro series, is underrated in my opinion. It haven't received the attention it deserves while it is pushing higher and higher in benchmark scores (looking at artifical analysis), and this was before Deepseek dropped V4.<p>Furthermore, their pricing plan is insanely cheap, they even upped usage limit for their cheapest plan, lite plan, which is at 5$ / month. And now, they are dropping a Harness for their own model? Amazing. I wish they added support for installation through Homebrew though.<p>On another note, this is what I would like to see more of from a company, what I do not welcome is startups making their model exclusive and hurt their customer base through sabotaging as a way to prevent eventual distillation attempts.
>Furthermore, their pricing plan is insanely cheap, they even upped usage limit for their cheapest plan, lite plan, which is at 5$ / month.<p>Unless something changed their plans aren't really worth getting. They're not that much cheaper than the per-token rates, and because it's a plan, you have to contend with weird usage restrictions. You're better off paying per-token unless you have some use case that demands a very steady stream of tokens.
Wow. I saw 4.1B credits and thought it was super generous. But my math says the subscription plan gives less value than the API.<p>For example, API input is $0.435 / M tokens, which works out to 13.79 M tokens for $6.<p>Plan is 300 credits per input token, which works out to 13.67 M tokens at 4.1B credits per $6.<p>Very similar math for cache input and output.
Looks like they have very effective collaboration with DeepSeek and Kimi. Those three models have been bouncing ideas and sharing R&D innovation, which made all of them improve very fast.<p>Based solely on quality and price, OpenAI, Anthropic, and other western models just can't compete with the new generation of Chinese open models.
>Looks like they have very effective collaboration with DeepSeek and Kimi.<p>The collaboration is informal. People don’t seem to realize this, but the Chinese internet for programmers and developers today feels a lot like StackExchange in its heyday. There’s a huge emphasis on sharing knowledge, because sharing what you know builds your profile, and becoming a rockstar in a subfield is one of the only ways to get ahead.<p>Competition in China is ruthless. But unlike in North America, where individuals are often bound by agreement to hoard knowledge because it can give them a competitive edge, the competitive advantage in China is building face and peer recognition. And that comes from proving that you are worthy of being a "master/teacher", and that extends to the valuation of your knowledge business. For example, the third wave coffee shops in China, the master roaster is often called "master/teacher" once they win a roasting competition and start sharing new knowledge of roasting in the public sphere, and that's a title of sincere respect.<p>You can see parallels with those that apply to give talks at conferences and post snazzy technical presentations they give in the US, but the bar for what qualifies as new knowledge is far higher in China because there's a massive ecosystem of people rushing to outcompete what you have to offer, and once the ball gets rolling on knowledge sharing, lots of people will go off and build upon that knowledge or try to build businesses on top of that, which in turn produces more knowledge.<p>Reading developer forums in China, once you crack the code (I find Gemini will get you a good chunk of the way with good translations), they are really quite far ahead with what they're willing to share. And I suspect in great part, the decision to release open-weights is heavily tied to that concept of building face/peer recognition = building valuations.
Thank you for the insights, this sounds like an environment I want to partake.<p>> Reading developer forums in China, once you crack the code (I find Gemini will get you a good chunk of the way with good translations), they are really quite far ahead with what they're willing to share.<p>Are you able to share those forums and other resources? I would love to read what people in these communities are sharing.
What forums do Chinese programmers use that you would recommend exploring around in?<p>Mainly want to see the people who are building stuff I've never even thought of.
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> Looks like they have very effective collaboration with DeepSeek and Kimi. Those three models have been bouncing ideas and sharing R&D innovation, which made all of them improve very fast.<p>Very fascinating to learn this, didn't know Moonshoot (Kimi) also collaborated with others. I think I read in another post that DeepSeek and Qwen team shared the same building? So that kind of explains it.<p>> Based solely on quality and price, OpenAI, Anthropic, and other western models just can't compete with the new generation of Chinese open models.<p>I have to agree. I had the great opportunity to take the offer Z.ai had with their Christmas deal, their lite plan was 3 months for 7$. GLM-4.7 was already impressive enough.<p>When they released GLM-5-Turbo and GLM-5.1, that is when I came to the realization of how close the gap is between proprietary western models and Chinese open-weight ones (not all of them are ofc).<p>I could barely believe how good GLM-5.1 was, I didn't think I was using it in CC and had to check the settings again. It's astonishing how close the gap is now, and this competition benefits us very much, the pricing is so low atm, its amazing.
Pretty neat that you can just install it and start using it (at a Sonnet 4.6-level model) without needing to sign in or pay.<p>Typically, Chinese websites are a big pain to log in or sign up because they require a +86 phone number due to legal reasons. Being able to use it without having to make an account is amazing for friction reduction. I could probably even just install it onto new machines to help with set up.<p>I wonder how they are gonna detect and block abuse though?
> at a Sonnet 4.6-level model<p>MiMo v2.5.0-Pro is honestly the first Chinese model that I've tried where I really though why should I use Claude Sonnet when I can get the same results for a fraction of the cost. There was always something off about Chinese models that made it apparent that it couldn't fully compete with GPT, Claude, Gemini, etc. but this was the first model where I was like, this feels like Sonnet.<p>I can't prove it, but I think they trained heavily on Claude output. From my perspective I don't care since Anthropic trained on my data.<p>Using them also works well for North Americans as our peak hours is not theirs.<p>If I had one complaint, the v2.5.0-Pro model thinks too much.
I find deepseek-v4-pro to be every bit as good as sonnet tbh
Is there a guide to running these models locally? Sonnet level inference on my own hardware would be world changing.<p>I have Claude but I don't want to ask it because Anthropic could decide to sabotage me.
GLM 5.1 is stronger than Sonnet 4.6 in my opinion, but while they have a coding plan that is a good value MiMo beats it on price. I haven't used MiMo much yet but it felt pretty similar.
“Just install it and use it” is great UX right up until the first botnet also discovers great UX.
Xiaomi has been selling physical products to West through their websites for 10+ years now. I dont think you will encounter any issues here
So funny I have noticed how terrible the signup is on all these Chinese models, companies etc. Always wonder why it is such an easy process. Like QQ, Tencent etc demos Ive seen past year
Much more information in the blog post this links to: <a href="https://mimo.xiaomi.com/blog/mimo-code-long-horizon" rel="nofollow">https://mimo.xiaomi.com/blog/mimo-code-long-horizon</a>
Claude and Codex pricing will eventually have to come down, for most common coding tasks you don't need a super smart slow model but a smart-enough and very fast one.
I’m not convinced they can come down, especially as they both are opening their books for S1 IPO filing.
cheap token for the win.<p>Microsoft github copilot recently changed their billing. i'm on the yearly subscription. GPT-5.4 is now 6x and even previously free model like GPT-5 mini now cost .33x. its only June 11 and my usage is now at 50%.
I don't think many understand that Sonnet and even Haiku can probably accomplish their task, instead of them invoking a beast like Opus to tell them about todays weather.
And yet, MiMo and DeepSeek, even MiniMax, are way cheaper and arguably better, or way better than both Sonnet and especially Haiku.<p>While you can argue you are ready to pay 100-1000 times the price for Fable or Opus because you need those last 1-2% of edge, there's no valid reason to keep paying the obscene amounts of money for Sonnet and Haiku when alternatives exist.
I don't known how Codex works, but we can set environment variables and point Claude CLI to deepseek. I think that before slashing prices they will slash those environment variables. After all they are not working to give a free TUI to deepseek and possibly to other competitors. But eventually yes, prices will go down or there will be an attempt at a regulatory capture.
Most importantly, we need a model that doesn't randomly refuse us when we ask it to do something, or worse, deliberately sabotages us when it thinks we're building competing products. Like Anthropic's Fable.
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I've worked a lot with MiMo in my project that pits LLMs against each other in games (clankerfights.ai). It is a very very good model for the price. MiniMax I'd say is smarter, but MiMo really touches near pareto frontier.
This is my favorite of the Chinese models I have tried. I think it would be hard to know if I was using Opus of MiMo if blindfolded in many instances.
Yes, but this has nothing to do with MiMo (the model).<p>This is what Claude Code is to Claude
I found it relevant and actually just the information I was looking for. Having a highly recommended model behind the tool makes it worth further investigation.
Uh, what model do you think this is using?
MiMo Code is not a model, it's a harness like Claude Code / OpenCode / Codex (which is still open source, Apache 2.0, btw).<p>You might mean the MiMo-V2.5-Pro model?
Good timing, I was looking for alternatives earlier today. opencode didn't install properly and I wasn't a fan of oh-my-pi and nanocoder.<p>MiMo code (via my z.ai coding plan) is very pleasant so far, nice UI and seems to respond faster than Claude Code. It might be injecting much less cruft into the conversation.<p>I also got access to the mimo-2.5-pro ultraspeed model yesterday, which is really quite snappy. It does cost more than DeepSeek, though, so I'm not sure whether it's worth it yet. Definitely fast though.
No 'training data', not 'open source'.
"MiMoCode is built as a fork of OpenCode."<p>Why not just contribute to OpenCode instead of creating a clone :/
Because they want to optimize it for their models and don't want to be blocked by waiting for PRs to merge or be rejected.<p>There's plenty of reasons to start your own fork that you have full agency of, as long as the OSS License is maintained anyone will be able to benefit from any new features they want to make use of.
Opencode sits on a ton of important PR's, so they didn't want to wait. Everybody else switched to omp (oh my pi) already.
To go a different path perhaps? You can't expect that all your ideas will land into a main repo and you really want to implement your vision while using a sane base.
OpenCode can merge in all their changes if they want.
There's a blog link <a href="https://mimo.xiaomi.com/blog/mimo-code-long-horizon" rel="nofollow">https://mimo.xiaomi.com/blog/mimo-code-long-horizon</a><p>I think there's simply too much changed.
Because its currently impossible to "contribute to Opencode".<p>There are over 500 pages of open issues, up from 78 less than a month ago. They are doing nothing to halt the garbage/duplicates that pop up, and not even addressing legitimate PRs/reports.
Could just be a courtesy - Americans tend to be rather suspicious and hostile to contributions coming from China, and it might draw unwarranted attention from agencies and bad media.
Why not?
> Why not just contribute to OpenCode instead of creating a clone :/<p>It's controlled by a different organization; in particular a startup in a "competing" space.
have you ever tried contributing a large number of changes to OSS?
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I don't think that's true? AFAIK OpenCode started as a TUI and their GUI app is Tauri-based, so don't think it was forked from OpenCode. You might be thinking of Cursor
Are you thinking of Cursor? OpenCode is a TUI like Codex.
Do you even know what you're talking about?<p>OpenCode started as an independent CLI project. Their desktop app is still in beta, and it was never a fork of VS Code.<p>I believe they contain no code derived from VS Code.
What does “shamelessly forked” mean? It’s literally software meant to be forked lol
There were once two harnesses named OpenCode, one written in Go & the other in TypeScript (the more popular one).<p><pre><code> Kujtim Hoxha creates a project named TermAI. (SST folks) Dax & Adam join the project, rebrand it to OpenCode with Dax buying the domain, opencode.ai.
Charm, the company behind the original libraries, acqui-hires Kujtim, who moves the project to Charm's organization, leaving SST unimpressed (due to VC involvement?)
Allegations Charm rewrote git history and deleted GitHub comments.
Dax claims ownership of the brand, forks project. For a time, 2 projects named OpenCode exist. Charm eventually renames its version to "Crush".
</code></pre>
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44741894">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44741894</a>
> MiMo Code is a terminal-based coding agent built by Xiaomi's MiMo team on top of OpenCode and open-sourced under the MIT license.<p>I think it is great that they built it on top of open code. Open Code harness is good and I want it to grow. Harness is very important and more projects use it, the more it is adopted.
I thought this was a wireless/MIMO radio project at first
yeah, was also expecting some disruption in the RF-design space.<p>Kinda RF-nerd clickbait... :)
Well Xiaomi is first and foremost a mobile phone company.
I also thought the same lol. It also happened with lora
My coding agent VT Code has recently become a Xiaomi Orbit partner. If you want to try out Xiaomi Mimo V2.5 and V2.5 Pro in a different harness, feel free to use my VT Code. VT Code supports Mimo V2.5/Pro via official Xiaomi endpoints and via OpenRouter. Thank you!<p>[0] <a href="https://github.com/vinhnx/VTCode/blob/main/README.md#Providers" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/vinhnx/VTCode/blob/main/README.md#Provide...</a>
> Unlimited Context<p>>Knowledge accumulates automatically with lossless compression, preserving every critical detail even across million-line projects.
As much as I absolutely love Mimo V2.5 Pro (it's a genuinely good model), I absolutely hate the way they calculate usage in their token plan.<p>For example: For a super small task in a small project that should not be consuming more than 500K total tokens after all tool calls included, their shown usage shot up to 152 million tokens.<p>But, when I scroll down on the same page, a table shows usage as 3 million tokens, out of which 2.5 million were cached.<p>This is such a huge conflict on the very same page. The bad thing is that the usage progress bar is shown against that 150 million token usage, not against that 3 million one.<p>This has been in discussions for at least past 3 months on reddit as well, and was precisely the reason I subscribed to their lowest tier, and for a single month only.<p>Update: their own harness, mimocode, shows total token usage as just 63.1K. We now have 3 entirely different values, differing in 3 orders of magnitude.<p>Update 2: So, I did the exact same task this time using DS4Pro, and total token usage was just 101K (as shown by opencode).
Are AI people using LLMs to name things? Just take a widely popular thing that already means something, capitalise it differently, and you're done.<p>Microsoft's LoRA (already a thing called LoRa) and now MiMo (already a thing called MIMO)<p>Maybe a classic Google search is not so bad, eh?
It's free to use because you are the product they are selling.
Only tangentially related: MiMo-2.5Pro is fast, cheap and very capable, although not quite gpt5.5 level iontelligence (I dont use the claudes). It works flawlessly in Pi and is an excellent workhorse. I expect big things from their next model.
I'm kind of surprised the demo UI is macOS. Are they mainly using Apple products to develop these things?
The installation method they officially propagate is dangerous.
curl -fsSL <a href="https://mimo.xiaomi.com/install" rel="nofollow">https://mimo.xiaomi.com/install</a> | bash<p>This is usually a PoC (Proof of concept) way to install something on a temporary container or temporary VM, but not for production use during daily desktop operation.<p>I was hoping their documentation would provide better installation instructions. But strangely, only for Windows do they recommend "npm install -g @mimo-ai/cli," which is a much better approach to managing installed packages.<p>For Mac/Linux, they have the strange recommendation to use the dangerous "curl <some_url> | bash." Quote:<p>> (for the best experience, Mac users are strongly encouraged to use iTerm or the VSCode Terminal)
> curl -fsSL <a href="https://mimo.xiaomi.com/install" rel="nofollow">https://mimo.xiaomi.com/install</a> | bash<p>:(
This is how everyone does it now. Including Anthropic.<p>To be fair, is that any different from naively trusting NPM? It's not like NPM is doing any vetting. They're every threat actors favorite sandbox these days.<p><a href="https://code.claude.com/docs/en/quickstart" rel="nofollow">https://code.claude.com/docs/en/quickstart</a>
You're right that it's as dangerous as it's executing random third-party code on your machine, but the method also has propagated far beyond PoCs and such at this point. All of these projects and many others push that install method: Bun, Deno, rustup, k3s, Docker (if using their helper script), Homebrew, Tailscale...
Frankly, it's not really more insecure than any other installation method. Apt packages and the like generally have the ability to specify pre/post-install scripts, so `sudo dpkg -i ./random.deb` is equivalent to `sudo bash ./random.sh`. Even if they didn't have pre/post-install scripts, they're still writing arbitrary files to arbitrary locations on your disk, so they can trigger execution the next time you boot or log in or whatever.<p>And at the end of the day, no matter the installation method (even just unpacking a tarball and executing the program directly from that directory), you're going to run their program on your computer, and then the program can do whatever it wants. Maybe you don't run it with sudo, but <a href="https://xkcd.com/1200/" rel="nofollow">https://xkcd.com/1200/</a> seems relevant.
A package (like a .deb) is a static artifact. It can be hashed, mirrored, and GPG-signed. Package managers usually verify that signature before any pre/post-install scripts. A "curl <some_url> | bash" pipe is a dynamic stream; the server can perform targeted attacks: sending a clean script to 99% of users and a malicious payload only to a specific IP address or User-Agent. This allows for targeted attacks that are invisible to the rest of the community.<p>Yes, running third-party code is always a leap of faith, but why choose a delivery method that removes the possibility of verification and opens the door to targeted injections? Convenience shouldn't be an excuse to ignore basic security hygiene.
The problem is that npm, cargo, etc. set the standard in people's minds for how package managers work, when the Linux community has been working on securing the supply chain issues for decades.<p>Like requiring a WoT (usually with physical meetups) vetting people creating packages, FTP-masters, dedicated clean buildbots, etc. in addition to the packages themselves being signed and so on.
Codex use this (for update).<p>> sh -c 'curl -fsSL <a href="https://chatgpt.com/codex/install.sh" rel="nofollow">https://chatgpt.com/codex/install.sh</a> | CODEX_NON_INTERACTIVE=1 sh'<p>This is just sh, not bash, but I doubt it would be any better.
Thats exactly same as Claude Code offer: <a href="https://code.claude.com/docs/en/quickstart" rel="nofollow">https://code.claude.com/docs/en/quickstart</a>
We've had this discussion since Eazel Linux desktop popularized bash | curl in 2001.<p>> npm install ... is a much better approach to managing installed packages.<p>No. Until the upcoming version of npm is out, npm will also run arbitrary code. Almost all common installation tools run arbitrary code. Not doing that is sadly the exception for now.
I use npm 11.16.0 and it did this<p>npm warn allow-scripts Run `npm approve-scripts --allow-scripts-pending` to review, or `npm approve-scripts <pkg>` to allow.
Isn't executing arbitrary code kind of the entire point of NPM though? Any chance you have a link to something that describes their plans?
> Isn't executing arbitrary code kind of the entire point of NPM though?<p>No. npm is a package manager. As mentioned in the comment you're replying to, almost all package managers execute arbitrary code. Eg:<p>- pip<p>- Cargo<p>- apt/dpkg<p>- dnf/yum<p>- Homebrew<p>- RubyGems<p>- Composer (limited)<p>- Maven<p>> Any chance you have a link to something that describes their plans?<p><a href="https://github.blog/changelog/2026-06-09-upcoming-breaking-changes-for-npm-v12/" rel="nofollow">https://github.blog/changelog/2026-06-09-upcoming-breaking-c...</a>
I get what you mean, but an NPM package is just a tarball of arbitrary code and some metadata. The whole point of it is to eventually run that arbitrary code, presumably. Otherwise why would you want to download the tarball and extract it? In fact, what purpose does NPM even serve if it's just a way to host tarballs?<p>I get the install time and run time execution might feel different, but I don't see how that's a security boundary at all.<p>I suspect that everyone will just get into the habit of typing --allowScripts all or whatever and nothing will actually change, because there's no point in a version of NPM that doesn't properly set things up for most people.
It was already open-source `<a href="https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode</a>`
Isn't Unlimited Context pretty difficult to promise? What exactly do they mean, could I just have two agents locked into a TTRPG back and forth forever?
That is an incredibly annoying grunge font. And what is the point of the hidden image in the background that reveals under your mouse cursor.
It's interesting that it renders Chinese in a TUI. I wonder if that breaks anything that assumes a character is always a column wide.
Terminals and things that live in terminals have relied on wcwidth() to handle this since time immemorial (which is always fun when they are out of sync, e. g. remote over ssh, but in the vast majority of the cases it just works).
Reading "xiaomi"in the headline I was thrilled to see MiMo only to find out it's NOT this one: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIMO" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIMO</a>
What a disappointment!
This is super exciting, can't wait to try it out
macOS binary (mimocode-darwin-arm64.zip ) seems broken: "“mimo” is damaged and can’t be opened. You should move it to the Trash."
No, you are just experiencing the best of Apple. How dare you download non notarized binaries on your own computer? Do you have a license for that?<p>Terminal > sudo xattr -rd com.apple.quarantine > Drag and drop the app into terminal > enter and enter your password
Strange, I reckon I installed Tahoe just a while ago and still didn't have a similar issue, but I remember on previous MacOS versions the error message for unotarized binaries, was to warn that there was indeed a security issue with the binary, not that it was simply "damaged".<p>A bit crappy on Apple's side.<p>Thank you.
"damaged" by not paying 99 bucks.
"damaged", even after paying 99$ : <a href="https://github.com/electron/notarize/issues/205#issuecomment-4427523676" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/electron/notarize/issues/205#issuecomment...</a><p>See last 20'ish comments.
the OS is broken, in this case.
Only worked for about 5m, then Too many requests.
mimocode gets it. This is actually, impressive! Chinese models are really up there with the rest.
isn't this just opencode with a different logo?
looks great. surprised that Xiaomi has made such great advancements in AI
Redditors are unhappy about their coding plan: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/opencodeCLI/comments/1t37dz3/xiaomi_mimo_coding_plan_is_a_absolute/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/opencodeCLI/comments/1t37dz3/xiaomi...</a><p>I guess the way to use their models is through another provider, like <a href="https://opencode.ai/go" rel="nofollow">https://opencode.ai/go</a>
Things have improved a lot since last month. Now their cheapest plan gives you 4.1B credits and I think the cache situation has improved too.
My comment on same: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48493358">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48493358</a>
Yes the subscription plan costs literally the same thing as just paying API-per-token pricing.
Looks an awful lot like OpenCode
Let the battle for the harnesses give free tokens for all, until the next competition arena does the same. It seems that's the only way AI will remain acessible.<p>This website is gorgeous, by the way. The mouse reveal on the background, amazing.
I got an invite to test their ultra fast model only to be geofenced when trying to use it. Pff!
sounds really cool if it was coming out of anywhere except China, which has laws to exfiltrate your data and send it back to the government for espionage purposes [0].<p>[0] <a href="https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/counterintelligence/the-china-threat" rel="nofollow">https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/counterintelligence/the-chin...</a>
Can this be used as an alternative to Claude backend? For Ralph loops? Replacing `claude -p`? Anyone can shed a light on this?
Hm, can I just use free tokens without using MiMo-Code?<p>OpenCode or pi.dev are enough. I don't like CC-style agent lock-in, regardless if it's Anthropic or Xiaomi doing it.
Any english links?
I wonder what the minimum required memory specification is
Is that Open-Source like, run it locally, no phone home included, or open source like the thin front-end layer is all that is actually open-source but it’s an empty shell without the remote API it relies on?
They default it to talking to a free version of their model (which is incredibly cheap if you decide you like it.)<p>But it seems trivially easy to run it against local models. Their onboarding guide offers that option, though I have no idea if it changes any functionality.
It defaults to the API, but you can download the weights for the 1T-parameter Pro model and selfhost if you have the hardware for it.
The latter. It looks like it's meant to be a batteries-included agent to promote their free-for-a-limited time AI service that it connects to by default.
Ok, fair enough compared to the rest of the proeminent actors I guess, but quite confusing from dev point of view. Lately I started to experiment with model like Qwen2.5 on local. Good enough to ask simple question, but didn’t manage to do anything remotely close a agents I started to experiment with through Copilot.
Today on open source vampires: xaomi forks an open source project, doesn't contribute upstream, attaches usage restrictions that are probably incompatible with the license, and wants good PR. Fuck these people.
Open source and open weight AI is very important to protect freedom of speech. OpenAI, and ESPECIALLY Anthropic, will try to ban them through regulatory capture / safety fearmongering. We need to make sure that does not happen. It’s not society’s problem if these frontier labs have no moats.
You know they are benchmaxxing when they end up writing their coding harness in TypeScript npm slop<p>Their models can't help them build it with something better?<p>That's the only benchmark people need, whether or not their model can raise the bar of their own product<p>And so far it's looking pretty sad
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