MiMo Code is now released and open-source

  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.

Open weight models are disruptive to the business models of closed model businesses. An incentive is if your business is built around X but model training is helpful to you, but you don’t expect to meter it specifically. You can release your models and undercut the exclusive moat of a new model company like OpenAI or Anthropic from becoming at some point a competitor, or holding their access as a chip in pricing negotiations. By opening your architectures and weights other competitors can build on them and newer better models emerge faster decoupled from a small number of proprietary models. This lets you focus on X while gaining overall momentum on your model release at no additional cost and no loss in focus on X, while defending against upstarts and monopolies.

This is effectively a lot of the open source world that comes from corporate development as well. It feels odd after this many decades of discussing corporate reasons to participate in open source we keep rehashing it.

A coding hardness with just bash outperforms Codex, Claude Code, OpenCode, Pi ect. The added features are just user experience features.

The case that is largely nonsense is the egress pricing on direct connects since beyond the circuit costs, which the customer pay, there’s no costs for aws not already on the customer regardless. It also makes DC friction weird in that you are incentivized to NOT move storage before compute.

Even if you consider profit motive, what is the profit motive for corporate contributions to open source? The same applies here.

They are already.

> and should open source all of their platforms

Most of the cloud platforms are open source. Linux, container, k8s… it’s entirely possible for someone to build and deploy their private cloud if they have the resources.

> and eliminate egress fees

What does it mean? If I sign up for cloud service I am only bound to the contract terms. If I am PAYGO I can switch anytime.

There's a very strong overlap with male gamers, who also think everything involving sophisticated engineering and design should be cheaper than a cup of coffee.

Just call it out and maybe we can collectively choose to towards a culture that doesn't encourage such shameless behavior or perverted values.

What? It’s actually insane that they haven’t yet.

I don’t like changing tools. What engineer does? I want to learn one tool and tune it to my exact preferences. Proprietary vendor tools are not portable and I avoid them.

Either Anthropic or OpenAI could drop the first-to-market open coding harness tomorrow and it would be as big as VSCode, it would be the standard platform everyone builds stuff on.

The question is why supply is restricted, primarily by sanctions and tariffs to China, and the expressed refusal of RAM makers to even think about increasing supply, they are actually all sweaty about China taking a bit of the unrestricted market.

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)?

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?

While ignorance of internationalization standards is a possibility, and the most likely cause.. I do wonder if it's a bit of a nudge to promote Chinese influence in the AI space.

Not that they really need to do that, China is already doing great (relatively, depending on criteria). The implosion of the US, the resulting brain drain and world shake-up has been very timely for their AI and other industries.

It's a very smart move for them to think longer term and start freezing out NVIDIA. Then they can take Taiwan purely for ideological concerns and not worry at all about the fabs blowing up in the process.

And they won't be dependent on foreign factories sitting on an island just off the shore of a superpower who's shown nothing below absolute resolve for decades towards the idea of conquering that island....

I know it's more mixed and complex than this, but i think a big opposition is not to the data centers themselves but to their locations. Too often it feels like the centers are exploiting local resources and community infrastructure rather than paying their share or locating themselves in places that are less likely to cause problems to home owners.

The whole process feels indifferent or even adversarial at times.

For example, API input is $0.435 / M tokens, which works out to 13.79 M tokens for $6.

Plan is 300 credits per input token, which works out to 13.67 M tokens at 4.1B credits per $6.

Very similar math for cache input and output.

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.

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.

I have Claude but I don't want to ask it because Anthropic could decide to sabotage me.

While you can argue you are ready to pay 100-1000 times the price for Fable or Opus because you need those last 1-2% of edge, there's no valid reason to keep paying the obscene amounts of money for Sonnet and Haiku when alternatives exist.

OpenCode started as an independent CLI project. Their desktop app is still in beta, and it was never a fork of VS Code.

I believe they contain no code derived from VS Code.

  Kujtim Hoxha creates a project named TermAI. (SST folks) Dax & Adam join the project, rebrand it to OpenCode with Dax buying the domain, opencode.ai.

  Charm, the company behind the original libraries, acqui-hires Kujtim, who moves the project to Charm's organization, leaving SST unimpressed (due to VC involvement?)

  Allegations Charm rewrote git history and deleted GitHub comments.

  Dax claims ownership of the brand, forks project. For a time, 2 projects named OpenCode exist. Charm eventually renames its version to "Crush".

telemetry enabled by default and named "analysis" is not great.

The 4.1 Gazillion credits is disingenuous.

It takes 200!!! hyper-inflation credits for ONE single token of uncached input.

Xiaomi had an issue, and instead of owning it, they covered it up with "look, now you get ALL THE (near worthless) CREDITS!!!!

"""

Credits 4,100,000,000 Credits

Total Token Consumption

"""

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.

npm warn allow-scripts Run `npm approve-scripts --allow-scripts-pending` to review, or `npm approve-scripts <pkg>` to allow.

Good idea actually.. why haven't I tried this before.

A bit crappy on Apple's side.

Thank you.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/an%20awful%20lot