# Kimi 931 Hacker News commenters recommended Kimi and 359 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 13 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 0.1 years (26 owners). It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule. **Verdict:** Moonshot's open-weight models rival top closed models at coding and research for a fraction of the price, though they can be slow and overthink. ## Why people recommend it - Rivals frontier closed models (9 comments): "IMO Kimi K2.5 beats everything but Opus 4.6 and Gemini 3.1... It's much better at most writing tasks, and its "Deep Research" mode is by a wide margin the best in the business." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47088640)) "Moonshot has been frontier since this summer. At this point whenever they release a model it's on par with whatever the latest OpenAI/Anthropic model release was." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50213764)) "it's the first time I can use an open-source model and not immediately tell the difference between it and top-end models from Anthropic and OpenAI" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46829431)) - Far cheaper than Claude, OpenAI (6 comments): "other providers can offer third-party open source models with roughly the similar quality like this, Kimi K2.6 or GLM 5.1 for 10 times less the price" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47886511)) "several Chinese models (at least Qwen, DeepSeek, Kimi and GLM) are "close enough" that with the right harness they are cost effective alternatives" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48390313)) "I have been using a quorum composed of step-3.5-flash, Kimi k2.5 and glm-5 and I have found it outperforms opus-4.5 at a fraction of the cost" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47088651)) - Open weights, can self-host (4 comments): "It should be clear looking at this model that if adversarial distillation from the closed frontier models in the U.S. contributed, it is at most to a relatively small degree." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48990629)) "Open weight models are available and work great, literally today kimi K3.1 pro was announced and goes toe to toe with closed models." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50217437)) "Moonshot open sourcing Kimi K3, a frontier AI and other components really means we are getting abundant AI for all of humanity." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49071488)) - Capable coding and debugging (4 comments): "It is also possible to test it yourself to see how good LLMs are at finding software issues: Find any open source project that isn't huge, then have Kimi 3 review it" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49155537)) "Broadly, I'd say it's quite capable, it even did a ton of validating, took screenshots, identified its own issues, and iterated repeatedly." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48995723)) "I use that specific model as my primary LLM for coding and diagnostics on projects in Python, C++, CUDA, and for web research." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50215603)) ## What people warn about - Slow, lengthy overthinking (4 comments): "They did exceed the expecations of pretty much everyone! I've also blogged about using the model, it's a bit on the slow side but pretty good!" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49102458)) "It's a lot stronger for geospatial intelligence tasks than any other model in my experience. Shame it's so slow in terms of tps" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46266189)) "my experience with older Kimi models was exactly this, that they'd spin for a whole chunk of time with a lot of back and forth thinking" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48942599)) - Struggles on complex codebases (3 comments): "It does small and medium things OK. But if I work on complex things, I'll later have to spend two days cleaning up the mess" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47842384)) "whenever I try to get my agent to write modern Zig based on a C reference it decides to start writing everything in a C style" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48324098)) "For HTML/CSS/JavaScript it seems to do fine. Maybe I am just asking too much of it, with a codebase spanning Rust and Elixir" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50270659)) - Self-hosting needs costly hardware (2 comments): "Other than the top performers (e.g. GLM 5.1, Kimi K2.5, where required hardware is basically unaffordable for a single person)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47808331)) "Models in the 700B+ category (GLM5, Kimi K2.5) are decent, but running those on your own hardware is a six-figure investment." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47230303)) - Censorship and content filtering (3 comments): "That message feels misleading to me though, I have trouble imagining they can fit their full content guidelines into 85 characters." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48936515)) "Has no problem telling you about other historical atrocities or repression performed by governments of other countries though." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45838171)) "It has internal bias too and the first comment mentions that additional censoring runs on top of the model output in the API." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47841174)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [Qwen 3.8 27B](https://hackerapproved.com/p/qwen-3-8-27b.md): 1173 recommend - [Z.ai GLM](https://hackerapproved.com/p/glm-5-2.md): 1043 recommend - [Gemma 4](https://hackerapproved.com/p/gemma-4.md): 713 recommend - [Qwen](https://hackerapproved.com/p/qwen.md): 474 recommend - [Qwen3.6-35B-A3B](https://hackerapproved.com/p/qwen3-6-35b-a3b.md): 373 recommend ## Where to get it - [Visit the official site](https://www.kimi.com/) ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "Kimi", https://hackerapproved.com/p/kimi-k3/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).