Until last week, you would've been right. Kimi K2.5 is absolutely competitive for coding.
Unless you include it in "frontier", but that has usually been used to refer to "Big 3".
Unless you include it in "frontier", but that has usually been used to refer to "Big 3".
(At todays ram prices upgrading to that for me would pay for a _lot_ of tokens...)
4x rtx 6000 pro is probably the minimum you need to have something reasonable for coding work.
I'd probably rather save the capex, and use the rented service until something much more compelling comes along.
Right now, I think we've probably got 3-5 years of manufacturing woes to work through and another 3-5 years beyond that to get power infrastructure where it needs to be to support it... and even then, I don't think all the resources we can reasonably throw at a combination of mostly nuclear and solar will get there as quickly as it's needed.
That also doesn't consider the bubble itself, or the level of poor to mediocre results altogether even at the frontier level. I mean for certain tasks, it's very close to human efforts in a really diminished timeframe, for others it isn't... and even then, people/review/qa/qc will become the bottleneck for most things in practice.
I've managed to get weeks of work done in a day with AI, but then still have to follow-up for a couple days of iteration on following features... still valuable, but it's mixed. I'm more bullish today than even a few months ago all the same.
Kimi K2.5 is good, but it's still behind the main models like Claude's offerings and GPT-5.2. Yes, I know what the benchmarks say, but the benchmarks for open weight models have been overpromising for a long time and Kimi K2.5 is no exception.
Kimi K2.5 is also not something you can easily run locally without investing $5-10K or more. There are hosted options you can pay for, but like the parent commenter observed: By the time you're pinching pennies on LLM costs, what are you even achieving? I could see how it could make sense for students or people who aren't doing this professionally, but anyone doing this professionally really should skip straight to the best models available.
Unless you're billing hourly and looking for excuses to generate more work I guess?
I still have to occasionally switch to Opus in Opencode planning mode, but not having to rely on Sonnet anymore makes my Claude subscription last much longer.