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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
"Death of Silicon Valley" in this case is such a funny perspective. Like, how twisted is the US's view of the market that they think "Competition? Oh no. Sound the alarms."
> 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.
Sounds like they slapped in a bunch of common plugins and released it as a product to promote the free-for-a-limited-time use of their new coding AI service.
> promote the free-for-a-limited-time use of their new coding AI service
Not sure which "free" service you're referring to, but MiMo v2.5 Pro is plenty capable & (after its recent 70%+ price drop) one of the most affordable options in its class (DeepSeek v4 Pro, MiniMax M3, & Qwen 3.7 Plus). I read somewhere that Labs are incentivized to implement custom harnesses because each model has its strengths, quirks, & blindspots (like Qwen forking Gemini CLI)?
I'm guessing the greatest reason behind each provider creating and agent harness is that (a) there is not a clear winner still and (b) it is harder to switch models with a competitor, as you also have to switch harness
Since the link is in Chinese: MiMo Code is Xiaomi’s AI agentic coding harness.
“ 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.”
Thanks, I missed that on first glance and did manual translation.
Not sure why my iPhone shows an option to translate website but all the destination languages to pick from (I have multiple languages installed), including English, are greyed out. iPhone does support translating from Chinese (Simplified or Traditional), and the button to translate website isn’t greyed out like it is for unsupported/unrecognized languages. Might be an iOS 27 bug, because it is working on other websites?
You're right, there are probably lots of sites misconfigured to not respect language headers, but we don't notice because English is the default.
However, the right solution is still to use the language header. I send that to them, they should use it to give me the right one by default.
One of the funny things is that this whole site is in an iframe; which breaks both Google Translate, and the Firefox translate feature. If you check, the outer iframe seems to indicate `lang="en'` and loads the iframe with `src="/coder/index.html?lang=en"`, but the inner iframe still gets a `lang="zh-CN'` by default until you use the toggle.
If you go to the eventual redirect source of the page with `lang=en` parameter, you get a `lang="en"` attribute, but it's still in Chinese until you toggle it with the menu: https://mimo.xiaomi.com/coder?lang=en
Anyhow, yeah, lots of pages are probably broken this way but we don't notice. But still, it has that info from your request, it should use it.
But what if you have English configured as a preferred language? Isn't that what it's for? Wouldn't it make sense for a website to respect that (when available)? I hate that google.com doesn't and defaults to random languages based on IP.
Web standard often give great grounds to leverage on. Modern stacks often really poorly work with a lot its surface and reinvente half baked bespoke alternatives.
Personally, none, I’m not English native. I didn’t notice the locale switch, but mostly because the look of the website was so beautiful I didn’t pay attention to menus. I wonder if ideograms keeps looking so beautiful once you learned to decode them. I never found Latin script to be particularly beautiful, and to this date Arabic script remains my favorite one in term of esthetic (I can’t read Arabic ever).
This is not exactly what you’re asking about, but I started learning Japanese when I was in the middle of playing Cyberpunk 2077 (for unrelated reasons); and I gotta tell you; realizing that 98% of the Japanese text everywhere in the game was just “hotel” or “karaoke” definitely took away some charm from it.
When you look at the source, you can set it to English from the params https://mimo.xiaomi.com/coder?lang=en
but there's a small bug, the hero subtitle isn't translated but everything else is.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Are you able to share those forums and other resources? I would love to read what people in these communities are sharing.
> 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.
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.
> Based solely on quality and price, OpenAI, Anthropic, and other western models just can't compete with the new generation of Chinese open models.
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.
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).
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.
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.
I wonder how they are gonna detect and block abuse though?
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.
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.
Using them also works well for North Americans as our peak hours is not theirs.
If I had one complaint, the v2.5.0-Pro model thinks too much.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Saying "This" on a post about "Mimo Code" leads one to, rightly, assume you are referring to "Mimo Code". If they commentor wanted to make a comment about a specific model it would have be clearer to simply mention the model instead of getting there transitively.
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.
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.
KHTML is dead now, though. It was basically embraced, extended and extinguished by Apple and Google, who both wanted to take away the leverage of the community.
Today, legacy KHTML maintainers are boxed-out of upstream decisions that might prevent Manifest v2 from swirling down the drain. I'd argue the story isn't very beautiful anymore.
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.
Because its currently impossible to "contribute to Opencode".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
it does have telemetry, enabled by default, that sends metrics to tracking.miui.com, including what model you are using. it can be turned off by environment variable (MIMOCODE_ENABLE_ANALYSIS=false), and yes it still has all the normal OpenCode provider logic so it will work with other/local models. it also automatically looks for updates and fetches a mimo model list, including when the telemetry is off, though those can also be disabled.
telemetry enabled by default and named "analysis" is not great.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Update 2: So, I did the exact same task this time using DS4Pro, and total token usage was just 101K (as shown by opencode).
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.
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.
For Mac/Linux, they have the strange recommendation to use the dangerous "curl <some_url> | bash." Quote:
> (for the best experience, Mac users are strongly encouraged to use iTerm or the VSCode Terminal)
> curl -fsSL https://mimo.xiaomi.com/install | bash
This is how everyone does it now. Including Anthropic.
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.
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.
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 https://xkcd.com/1200/ 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.
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.
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.
We've had this discussion since Eazel Linux desktop popularized bash | curl in 2001.
> npm install ... is a much better approach to managing installed packages.
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.
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?
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".
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).
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That’s a charity, not a business model.
> That’s a charity, not a business model.
https://gwern.net/complementGood 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.
ah nevermind it's just a fork of OpenCode
As much as their propaganda wants us to believe, Anthropic is not 'the industry'.
what do you mean by should?
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:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiaomi_Mi_1
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:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9421471"Death of Silicon Valley" in this case is such a funny perspective. Like, how twisted is the US's view of the market that they think "Competition? Oh no. Sound the alarms."
You want a cookie?
> 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.
From github
Sounds like they slapped in a bunch of common plugins and released it as a product to promote the free-for-a-limited-time use of their new coding AI service.
> promote the free-for-a-limited-time use of their new coding AI service
Not sure which "free" service you're referring to, but MiMo v2.5 Pro is plenty capable & (after its recent 70%+ price drop) one of the most affordable options in its class (DeepSeek v4 Pro, MiniMax M3, & Qwen 3.7 Plus). I read somewhere that Labs are incentivized to implement custom harnesses because each model has its strengths, quirks, & blindspots (like Qwen forking Gemini CLI)?
I'm guessing the greatest reason behind each provider creating and agent harness is that (a) there is not a clear winner still and (b) it is harder to switch models with a competitor, as you also have to switch harness
What I like about MiMo too is that it is multimodal.
For example, I can send screenshots of what I'm developing and it understands.
I thought only the MmiMo 2.5 non-pro was multimodal?
Only non-pro is multimodal I believe
> like Qwen forking Gemini CLI
That was a good call. Gemini CLI is dead.
don't anthropomorphize the guillotine
So, basically the same thing silicon valley has been doing for the past half decade.
Since the link is in Chinese: MiMo Code is Xiaomi’s AI agentic coding harness.
“ 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.”
GitHub link (English): https://github.com/XiaomiMiMo/MiMo-Code
@dang might be better to link to the GitHub, and not for language reasons.
(Edit: for posterity, original URL as submitted was [0]).
[0]: https://mimo.xiaomi.com/mimocode
You can change the language via the header: The rightmost option is a language dropdown.
It's a client-side change and doesn't impact the URL so users must manually change it each time they visit the site though
Thanks, I missed that on first glance and did manual translation.
Not sure why my iPhone shows an option to translate website but all the destination languages to pick from (I have multiple languages installed), including English, are greyed out. iPhone does support translating from Chinese (Simplified or Traditional), and the button to translate website isn’t greyed out like it is for unsupported/unrecognized languages. Might be an iOS 27 bug, because it is working on other websites?
Why not persist it through a query param? Or a lang param for that matter
Feels like maybe you're just noticing this because it defaults to Chinese. Is that true?
How many sites do this but you don't notice because they default to English?
You're right, there are probably lots of sites misconfigured to not respect language headers, but we don't notice because English is the default.
However, the right solution is still to use the language header. I send that to them, they should use it to give me the right one by default.
One of the funny things is that this whole site is in an iframe; which breaks both Google Translate, and the Firefox translate feature. If you check, the outer iframe seems to indicate `lang="en'` and loads the iframe with `src="/coder/index.html?lang=en"`, but the inner iframe still gets a `lang="zh-CN'` by default until you use the toggle.
If you go to the eventual redirect source of the page with `lang=en` parameter, you get a `lang="en"` attribute, but it's still in Chinese until you toggle it with the menu: https://mimo.xiaomi.com/coder?lang=en
Anyhow, yeah, lots of pages are probably broken this way but we don't notice. But still, it has that info from your request, it should use it.
But what if you have English configured as a preferred language? Isn't that what it's for? Wouldn't it make sense for a website to respect that (when available)? I hate that google.com doesn't and defaults to random languages based on IP.
Web standard often give great grounds to leverage on. Modern stacks often really poorly work with a lot its surface and reinvente half baked bespoke alternatives.
Personally, none, I’m not English native. I didn’t notice the locale switch, but mostly because the look of the website was so beautiful I didn’t pay attention to menus. I wonder if ideograms keeps looking so beautiful once you learned to decode them. I never found Latin script to be particularly beautiful, and to this date Arabic script remains my favorite one in term of esthetic (I can’t read Arabic ever).
This is not exactly what you’re asking about, but I started learning Japanese when I was in the middle of playing Cyberpunk 2077 (for unrelated reasons); and I gotta tell you; realizing that 98% of the Japanese text everywhere in the game was just “hotel” or “karaoke” definitely took away some charm from it.
This is really strange, but the link provided has an iframe pointing to https://mimo.xiaomi.com/coder
When you look at the source, you can set it to English from the params https://mimo.xiaomi.com/coder?lang=en but there's a small bug, the hero subtitle isn't translated but everything else is.
Wondering why this is in an iframe.... so strange
Language support was probably an afterthought since their target audience all read Chinese
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
Mainly want to see the people who are building stuff I've never even thought of.
> 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.
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.
> Based solely on quality and price, OpenAI, Anthropic, and other western models just can't compete with the new generation of Chinese open models.
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.
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).
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.
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.
I wonder how they are gonna detect and block abuse though?
> at a Sonnet 4.6-level model
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.
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.
Using them also works well for North Americans as our peak hours is not theirs.
If I had one complaint, the v2.5.0-Pro model thinks too much.
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
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.
cheap token for the win.
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.
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.
Claude Code TUI is garbage. There's nothing worth protecting in there.
Much more information in the blog post this links to: https://mimo.xiaomi.com/blog/mimo-code-long-horizon
Terrific link thanks for highlighting it
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).
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.
MiMo Code is not a model, it's a harness like Claude Code / OpenCode / Codex (which is still open source, Apache 2.0, btw).
You might mean the MiMo-V2.5-Pro model?
He didn't say MiMo Code
Saying "This" on a post about "Mimo Code" leads one to, rightly, assume you are referring to "Mimo Code". If they commentor wanted to make a comment about a specific model it would have be clearer to simply mention the model instead of getting there transitively.
Mind numbing
Sorry for confusion. I indeed meant the model itself.
"MiMoCode is built as a fork of OpenCode."
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.
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.
This is the beauty of open source :) KHTML -> WebKit -> Blink is a good example.
KHTML is dead now, though. It was basically embraced, extended and extinguished by Apple and Google, who both wanted to take away the leverage of the community.
Today, legacy KHTML maintainers are boxed-out of upstream decisions that might prevent Manifest v2 from swirling down the drain. I'd argue the story isn't very beautiful anymore.
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 https://mimo.xiaomi.com/blog/mimo-code-long-horizon
I think there's simply too much changed.
Because its currently impossible to "contribute to Opencode".
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.
have you ever tried contributing a large number of changes to OSS?
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 :/
It's controlled by a different organization; in particular a startup in a "competing" space.
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.
I thought this was a wireless/MIMO radio project at first
Well Xiaomi is first and foremost a mobile phone company.
yeah, was also expecting some disruption in the RF-design space.
Kinda RF-nerd clickbait... :)
I also thought the same lol. It also happened with lora
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.
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.
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.
Opencode didn't install properly? Its just "mise use -g opencode@latest"
is it local compatible and does it have telemetry?
it does have telemetry, enabled by default, that sends metrics to tracking.miui.com, including what model you are using. it can be turned off by environment variable (MIMOCODE_ENABLE_ANALYSIS=false), and yes it still has all the normal OpenCode provider logic so it will work with other/local models. it also automatically looks for updates and fetches a mimo model list, including when the telemetry is off, though those can also be disabled.
telemetry enabled by default and named "analysis" is not great.
> Unlimited Context
>Knowledge accumulates automatically with lossless compression, preserving every critical detail even across million-line projects.
This is super exciting, can't wait to try it out
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Update 2: So, I did the exact same task this time using DS4Pro, and total token usage was just 101K (as shown by opencode).
It's very confusing. They have tokens for their API and credits for their "token plan".
Even worse... they use both terms on the same page in dashboard.
"""
Credits 4,100,000,000 Credits
Total Token Consumption
"""
Ooooo... I now realize the trick. It's a mental play... give 1000x of "credits" but charge in same old tokens.
mimocode gets it. This is actually, impressive! Chinese models are really up there with the rest.
The installation method they officially propagate is dangerous. curl -fsSL https://mimo.xiaomi.com/install | bash
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.
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.
For Mac/Linux, they have the strange recommendation to use the dangerous "curl <some_url> | bash." Quote:
> (for the best experience, Mac users are strongly encouraged to use iTerm or the VSCode Terminal) > curl -fsSL https://mimo.xiaomi.com/install | bash
:(
This is how everyone does it now. Including Anthropic.
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.
https://code.claude.com/docs/en/quickstart
Codex use this (for update).
> sh -c 'curl -fsSL https://chatgpt.com/codex/install.sh | CODEX_NON_INTERACTIVE=1 sh'
This is just sh, not bash, but I doubt it would be any better.
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.
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 https://xkcd.com/1200/ 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.
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.
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.
Thats exactly same as Claude Code offer: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/quickstart
We've had this discussion since Eazel Linux desktop popularized bash | curl in 2001.
> npm install ... is a much better approach to managing installed packages.
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.
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?
No. npm is a package manager. As mentioned in the comment you're replying to, almost all package managers execute arbitrary code. Eg:
- pip
- Cargo
- apt/dpkg
- dnf/yum
- Homebrew
- RubyGems
- Composer (limited)
- Maven
> Any chance you have a link to something that describes their plans?
https://github.blog/changelog/2026-06-09-upcoming-breaking-c...
I'm kind of surprised the demo UI is macOS. Are they mainly using Apple products to develop these things?
The more advanced devs all use apple laptops, sure.
Who isn’t?
I'm slapping debian on any crap hardware around, but that's just me with different ideological standards.
It was already open-source `https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode`
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?
Do you plan to ask them some master plan to live forever?
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?
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".
A bit crappy on Apple's side.
Thank you.
"damaged" by not paying 99 bucks.
the OS is broken, in this case.
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).
looks great. surprised that Xiaomi has made such great advancements in AI
Redditors are unhappy about their coding plan: https://www.reddit.com/r/opencodeCLI/comments/1t37dz3/xiaomi...
Yes the subscription plan costs literally the same thing as just paying API-per-token pricing.
Looks an awful lot like OpenCode
> MiMoCode is built as a fork of OpenCode.
That’s why
Why is OpenCode awful?
Who said that?
Only worked for about 5m, then Too many requests.
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?
OpenCode or pi.dev are enough. I don't like CC-style agent lock-in, regardless if it's Anthropic or Xiaomi doing it.
I got an invite to test their ultra fast model only to be geofenced when trying to use it. Pff!
Any english links?
You can change language from the top right-most dropdown, and select English
Top right corner
You know they are benchmaxxing when they end up writing their coding harness in TypeScript npm slop
Their models can't help them build it with something better?
That's the only benchmark people need, whether or not their model can raise the bar of their own product
And so far it's looking pretty sad
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.)
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.
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.
qwen3.5 9b runs okay on my 12GB gaming GPU. It's very stupid as a coding agent but it's possible to get useful work out of it.
I am experimenting with LFM2.5-8B-1A and getting 250tps on a 3060
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.