alt Hacker NewsHaving tested K3, Qwen 3.8 max preview, Fable and Sol for the past few days, I partially agree. Don’t trust the benchmarks, and the Chinese models really are slow and token-inefficient.
However they do seem very close to SOTA : I’d say roughly equal to previous gen (Opus 4.8, GPT 5.5). It’s yet another silly benchmark, but compare them here: https://senko.net/vibecode-bench/
I also had K3, Qwen3.8 and Fable (using Kimi Code, Qwen Code and Claude Code harnesses respectively, and the official APIs) create a simple but far from trivial web app (zero shot, from a detailed spec). In user testing all three results looked/behaved more or less the same. I had Sol (via codex) do code reviews on all three and it concluded all three were solid, with some room for improvement. Fable was slightly ahead of the pack.
In my own work I still prefer Opus 4.8 (until Antrophic come to their senses and allow 100% Fable usage on Max plans) and Sol, but if I had to find an alternative, I could live with both K3 and Qwen3.8 just fine.
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To your slow point: I did a quick eval for a data viz task to do a qualitative comparison and Fable was much faster (by 4x), but I struggle with the "token inefficiency" as a sort of whatever metric.
Kimi was half the cost and produced a near identical output.
On a fairly simple coding task Kimi was 2x the cost and 7x as slow (and gpt-5.6-sol was even cheaper).
In my limited anecdotal experience, Kimi K3 is a bit better than Opus 4.8 and Qwen3.8 Max is disastrously bad. It can reason fine, but the moment it tries to do something it gets stuck into long second-guessing loops with no progress. It sometimes refuses to try and debug a problem even after multiple suggestions. I'm sticking to K3.
Could you check how many tokens the different models spent to do the task? With all the comments about Kimi K3 Not being token efficient I'm curious if your test confirms that
with all the hype around kimi i actually renewed my subscription (last time i tried it out was on 2.5 release) - just the 40€ one.
Its hard to compare that one to my regular sub of anthropic (107€), but everyone always says how much cheaper it is so i thought it was worth a try.
1.5 days later ive went through more then 50% of my weekly usage and decided to renew the regular anthropic sub too.
The API Pricing is definitely cheaper, but anthropics subscription budget seems to equalize that advantage right now. also kimi code feels like claude code from ... september 2025
also - considering how they announced they'd temporarily close subscriptions to make sure they can service customers... i was slightly surprised that there was no issue subscribing, less then 1 day after that announcement. Makes you think if that was just a marketing stunt
I love Kimi for some things, but K3 to me struggles with things Opus 4.8 breezes through. Admittedly stuff that is on the more complex side (code generation bugs in a compiler) to the point that after two days of struggle I stopped Kimi and will have Opus redo its work once I have spare tokens...
This wasn't just being slow - it didn't make forward progress.
For simpler stuff even 2.7 does just fine, though.
Haha, this is awesome. Hadn't heard of it, thank you for the link.
> the Chinese models really are slow and token-inefficient
This totally depends on the model. Deepseek V4 is very fast and efficient.
Honestly my anecdotal experience is that fable is benchmaxxed. I have not observed useful gains for Claude since 4.6, with each model iteration making progressively poorer decisions in pursuit of its goal.
The 5.5/5.6 series has performed quite well however. My guess is that my use cases stop aligning to swebench pro around 50% accuracy, and more closely align with DeepSWE.
I don't see a difference in capabilities between k3 and fable, but k3 is slow and expensive. Burned through my monthly plan in 3 days.
Yeah, open weights hasn't fully caught up yet, but it's getting very close. And it's certainly passed the point of being reasonably interchangeable with the frontier for (programming) work. Add in the benefits of not being rug-pulled by the frontier labs silently messing with, the knobs on their models or outright denying you the ability to do certain kinds of work (c.f. the HuggingFace fiasco), and they probably come out ahead in several respects.