Kimi Code: a model lab that builds its own harness, then opens it to every other shell over two protocols
Kimi Code is the developer coding service from Moonshot AI at kimi.com/code, and it sits in an unusual spot in this cohort: most harnesses are shell vendors plugging into models, while Kimi Code is a model lab building its own shell and then opening the API over two protocols at once - OpenAI-compatible at api.kimi.com/coding/v1 (China) and api.kimi.ai/coding/v1 (overseas), Anthropic-compatible at api.kimi.com/coding/ and api.kimi.ai/coding/ - with dedicated integration guides for Claude Code, OpenCode, Codex and Hermes Agent, which amounts to opening its own models to every other shell. Three clients run in parallel: Desktop (released 2026-09-17 for macOS Apple Silicon/Intel and Windows, moving the CLI agent core into a GUI), the CLI (the kimi command, widest feature surface, install.sh verifies checksums; Windows relies on Git Bash from Git for Windows with KIMI_SHELL_PATH for non-standard bash.exe) and a VS Code extension. The model surface is three models across four model IDs - k3, k3-256k, kimi-for-coding, kimi-for-coding-highspeed - and the docs insist on the model ID rather than a version name (writing K3 or K2.8 Preview fails outright), since a misspelled HighSpeed ID falls back silently instead of erroring. K2.7 Code HighSpeed runs about 180 tokens/s (up to 260 on short context) at 5-6x speed for 3x quota, and it only accelerates model output, so rounds dominated by tool calls feel little faster. K2.7 Code was released and open-sourced on 2026-06-12 with official deltas over K2.6 of Program-Bench +10.4%, MCP Mark Verified +11.4%, SWE Marathon +76.2% and 30% fewer reasoning tokens. Boundaries: all readings come from the vendor or vendor-relayed external benchmarks and were not independently reproduced; the K3 technical report is not public alongside the weights; quota is tightly bound to membership tiers (the 1M tier costs about twice the 256K tier, HighSpeed three times); older models retire fast (kimi-k2 on 2026-05-25, kimi-latest on 2026-01-28, kimi-k2.5 and moonshot-v1 on 2026-08-31). Confidence C (vendor-claim).