> I’d encourage devs to use MiniMax, Kimi, etc for real world tasks that require intelligence.
I use MiniMax daily, mostly for coding tasks, using pi-coding-agent mostly.
> The down sides emerge pretty fast: much higher reasoning token use, slower outputs, and degradation that is palpable.
I don't care about token use, I pay per request in my cheap coding plan. I didn't notice slower outputs, it's even faster than Anthropic. Degradation is there for long sessions with long contexts, but that also happens with Anthropic models.
> Sadly, you do get what you pay for right now. However that doesn’t prevent you from saving tons through smart model routing, being smart about reasoning budgets, and using max output tokens wisely. And optimize your apps and prompts to reduce output tokens.
Exactly. For my use case, I get 1500 API requests every 5 hours for 10€ monthly. I never hit the limit, even during the intensive coding sessions.
What I notice is, while Opus and Sonnet feel better for synthetic benchmarks, it doesn't matter in the real world. I never put so much effort into coming up with a perfect problem spec like the ones in benchmarks. I don't craft my prompts for hours expecting the LLM to one-shot a working program for me. And that's exactly what all those benchmarks are doing. And that's where Anthropic tools shine in comparison to cheaper Chinese models.
When it comes to the real world, where I put my half-baked thoughts in broken English in a prompt and execute 20 prompts in half an hour, the difference between Opus, Sonnet, and MiniMax is minimal, if at all. There, I don't want to think about costs and token savings and switching between different Anthropic models. I just use MiniMax, and that's it.
Yes, MiniMax sometimes gets stuck. Then I switch to Opus to unblock it. But the same happens if I use Opus the whole session. It gets stuck eventually, and model switch is sometimes required to get a fresh perspective on the problem.
The only difference is, using Opus or Sonnet quickly eats up my budget, while with MiniMax I have basically unlimited usage (for my coding use case) for 10€ per month.
I've only been using free tokens for a year now. Gemini and they just dropped pro so I switched to minimax. Bit of a hurdle switching from Gemini-cli to kilo-cli, but now I can't really see too much difference.
If I was starting new projects I'd pay for a better model, but honestly I don't really know any different.
I've not ever used Claude and people seem to rave about it. Maybe its good, but I doubt its $200/month good.
When I hit issues with these lower models I think hard about creating the right tooling - agnostic to the harness and I feel like maybe its more work but I can carry those tools to any setup going forward. That's how it was in the early Linux days so why change what clearly works?
I've used Gemini and now claude. Both were meh until I found the superpowers skill. Will be trying chatgpt next month.
You can "feel" the llm being limited with Gemini, less so with Claude. Hopefully even less so with chatgpt
What is this 10€ per month subscription that you are talking about?
MiniMax token plan
https://platform.minimax.io/docs/guides/pricing-token-plan
How is the speed and stability?
These small Chinese companies dont always have access to serious hardware.