4 ms·

> Kimi Work is a Local Agent designed for deep workflows. It mounts your local folders, navigates the web autonomously via WebBridge, runs Python code in the ba

by wxw 3mo ago

> Kimi Work is a Local Agent designed for deep workflows. It mounts your local folders, navigates the web autonomously via WebBridge, runs Python code in the background, and executes scheduled tasks. It's clearly a dupe of Claude/Codex products (Codex especially, styling-wise), but I think Kimi's goal here is simply to appear on feature-parity with bigger labs. I doubt they'd want to invest much into designing a UI for "the future of agentic work" from the ground up. Their bread and butter and claim-to-fame will continue to be low-cost, near-frontier models, for which they need to at least appear to have some app layer to plug into. And, in some ways, duping is a great way to show people that even the app layer can be commoditized.

piker 3mo ago
In that case is there not some open harness that demand can coalesce around?
- Maxatar 3mo ago
  There are but then you're required to pay API prices for them which can end up costing significant multiples of the price of the subscription.
  - jaggederest 3mo ago
    I am confused why they don't just offer a subscription with bring-your-own-harness, that would be a differentiator from claude/codex I think.
    - sroussey 3mo ago
      Negative margins to have you hooked on someone else’s software?
      - jaggederest 3mo ago
        I am gently presuming that they are not selling tokens at a loss in their all-you-can-eat plans like the frontier models are, but maybe I'm wrong.
    - bglusman 3mo ago
      Actually unless they’ve changed substantially Kimi kind of does this? It’s not as advertised/focused on and the API is a little nonstandard making it hard to plug some things into, but, unlike Claude they’ll actually give you an API key you can use directly as part of your unmetered subscription. I played with it for a month or two out of curiosity, it ls not a bad value though a bit brittle and stuff
    - john01dav 3mo ago
      The Chinese api prices are already so cheap that that is arguably not needed. You can also get $10/month opencode go (which officially can be used with any harness) with basically every major open weight model running inference in a place that I deem more trustworthy than the subject-to-Chinese-law inference options (but research this for yourself, there are some asterisks). This is what I use (in opencode) when I want an agent for personal use. Even if I'm being fairly intense with my usage by my standards anyway), I haven't managed to run out (yet), although I usually use the cheaper models (deepseek v4 is my favorite, and I've used both flash and pro). From the FAQ: > The plan is designed primarily for international users, with models hosted in the US, EU, and Singapore for stable global access. Our providers follow a zero-retention policy and do not use your data for model training. And: > Yes, you can use Go with any agent. Follow the setup instructions in your preferred coding agent.
      - wasfgwp 3mo ago
        Isn’t OpenCode just reselling Deepseek’s tokens over the same API? For v4-pro the prices from other providers on OpenRouter are way higher so what else could it be? Opencode Go already seems extremely unprofitable if people use up at least 30% of their monthly tokens so its hard to imagine they’d go with several times more expensive inference provider yet show Deepseek pricing on their page.
        john01dav 3mo ago
        They may have a bespoke deal with someone. They may be losing money. They may have believed a claim from Deepseek about not storing things more than they should. It may be something else. AFAIK no third party audit has been done so all that we have is what they say.
    - wasfgwp 3mo ago
      I think that pretty much all Chinese providers do that? And Codex obviously allows that as well. Anthropic is pretty the main exception.
- Gigachad 3mo ago
  Vs code copilot lets you bring your own api key for services like open router. But it usually only makes sense to do this with the Chinese models because OpenAI/Google/Anthropic heavily punish you for not using their proprietary lock in harness.
fttt 3mo ago
Yup they have a cost advantage. They just need to be good enough and just copy. Sorry american labs - it’s the beginning of the end.
- OutOfHere 3mo ago
  American labs will do fine with monthly subscriptions costing $20-300/month. They will not do fine for heavy basic LLM API calls -- it is for this that the cheap API produces substantial savings. Specialized niche provisions, e.g. excellent tool use, reliable structured output, reliable long context, cached and uncached web search, document reads, computer use, integrations, etc. also will take time for the foreign services to be good at.
  - PunchTornado 3mo ago
    you are not a trillion company if you just get 20$ a month. if that's the case, the valuation will drop 10x
    - OutOfHere 3mo ago
      I did note $20-300. In particular, domestic employers would surely still spend the upper end of it for each of their engineer staff. If there are 4 million software developers in the US of any job title, and if the employer of each spends $200 per month for the developer, that's $800M per month in revenue.
      - deepvibrations 3mo ago
        [dead]
      - PunchTornado 3mo ago
        you wouldn't get the full market share, but for 1T company with 20pe you still need ~10B of revenue per month. And growing. that is hard from subscriptions alone because there are only so many developers. (google has 40B per month and is a 4T company.)
micromacrofoot 3mo ago
So much is invested in the huge American AI companies that China undercutting them with clones that work almost as well can actually hurt the US economy. They're at the point where copying can get people 90% of what they want anyway, the moat is drying up.
- stusmall 3mo ago
  If you remove the word "AI" from your post it also describes the last 20 or so years of US/Chinese economic competition. They are real, serious competitor but also there is a lot of value in that last 10%. Some buyers need the best and you can charge a premium for it. The speed in which a copier can catch up to a leader is faster than every before, but everything is faster these days. I think the threat is if can these labs catch up and pass American labs while keeping costs low, but I don't see that happening.
  - ajross 3mo ago
    > the last 20 or so years of US/Chinese economic competition Only with some industries, mostly electronics and light manufacturing. The rest of the history of software products doesn't look like this at all. China cloned Amazon and Meta fairly well (but only within their local/captured markets) but not Microsoft or Google and absolutely not Apple. Entertainment and culture exports are still effectively zero (like, what, three blockbuster films?) where the US, Japan and Korea define pop across the globe. Heavy industry is mixed, with decent success in consumer vehicles now but little purchase in stuff like heavy equipment or shipbuilding. Basically it's complicated, and not really a point well suited to that kind of generalism.
    - cgio 3mo ago
      Not British, but taking UK out of the definition of pop, is a bit too rough a cut. Also France. Look at the queues outside pop-glamorous stores. And was pop-art a pop artefact? Is TikTok redefining pop? Movies is an old measure, and even US has fallen with just franchise dominating. I think as a globe we are much more integrated and co-dependent, occasionally also in bad ways, than we appreciate.
TacticalCoder 3mo ago
> Their bread and butter and claim-to-fame will continue to be low-cost, near-frontier models, ... K3 is beating Fable on several benchmarks. So I take it you don't consider Fable 5 to be frontier. What are the frontier models?
- adventured 3mo ago
  People endlessly claimed the same thing about DeepSeek upon its release. they claim it every single time a very large cutting edge model is released out of China. It's a combination of propaganda, some truth, and the faux open culture desperation to see big tech get destroyed (somehow better if big China takes its place instead).
  - TacticalCoder 3mo ago
    https://arena.ai/leaderboard/code https://arena.ai/leaderboard/code (that's just one, there are others... and several are claiming that those saying "yes sure it's just as good, but it uses more tokens" ain't really true either). And I don't think anyone is excited about China releasing anything: I think people like the idea of open-weights.
thomasahle 3mo ago
> duping is a great way to show people that even the app layer can be commoditized Everyone is already cloning the app layer. There are 30+ claude-code clone, and codex work already cloned cowork, grok and gemini is doing the same.
- CookieCrisp 3mo ago
  I highly recommend to anyone that uses them a lot - try to clone your own. I’ve got mine fully formed into how I want it, with features I haven’t seen anywhere else yet and with integration into everything I work with. We’ve lived in a world where every app had to fit enough people well enough - but now we live in a world where an app can be molded to be absolutely perfect for just you!
  - theplumber 3mo ago
    This is the way. Guess what am I working right now? My own “Work” app that will be better than anything else available today!
    - rush86999 3mo ago
      Same here! https://github.com/rush86999/atom https://github.com/rush86999/atom
      - theplumber 3mo ago
        Looks like the thing I am building but of course mine will be slightly different. It would be great if we could all meet to show off and discuss our AI stuff.
  - jascha_eng 3mo ago
    How did you build your own coding agent? What language/framework did you use?
    - crystal_revenge 3mo ago
w4yai 3mo ago
> It's clearly a dupe of Claude/Codex products Have you seen Kimi Code ? It's hard to believe it's a different code than Claude Code.
cadamsdotcom 3mo ago
Some paradigms are simply ergonomic. Sometimes there's only one UX people will accept. No one would buy a car steered with pedals; even if that is better (hey planes do it!) - every car maker is "copying" steering wheels and putting them on their cars. Is it controversial? If not why not?
- mh- 3mo ago
  It wasn't controversial because there was about 200 years of prior art from sailing ships. (Before the wheel, ships were steered with tillers - which early cars also tried, interface-wise.)
zkmon 3mo ago
I think we need to stop using the term "dupe" as if there was some originality somewhere that was not built upon or copied what already existed.
- sdiepend 3mo ago
  "Everything is a Remix" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRHRUNpWzAY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRHRUNpWzAY
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
- QuantumGood 3mo ago
  "Good artists copy, great artists steal, the best artists make lies seem true." – Steve Jobs. Actually, Jobs self-servingly refactored then misattributed to Picasso the line, "Good artists copy, great artists steal." Jobs did seem to properly remarket Picasso's intent, though, as Picasso had said: "When there's anything to steal, I steal." "What does it mean, an artist copies? It is normal. The important thing is to do it better." "Art is a series of masterly thefts."
  - geniium 3mo ago
    Thanks for making me smile I love that quote and like to share it often with people around me
    - QuantumGood 3mo ago
      Love the AI format with obvious misunderstanding to this and all your other comments; makes it much easier to find AI bots like yourself.
  - goolz 3mo ago
    That last line is wonderful! Thank you for this man. I honestly like the original more despite it's wordiness.
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
the-mitr 3mo ago
Copying and reinterpreting/reimplementing successful technologies and processes is the bedrock of human civilization
asdaqopqkq 3mo ago
weird to all it a dupe, these are new paradigms, it's like saying BMW duped Mercedes Benz cause they both make stuff on 4 wheels
idontneedcoffee 3mo ago
I want to believe I work on something creative in this space (even though, the current UI was never "meant to be" and (d?)evolved from a substrate of cheaply available UI components and laziness). THen again, much of the unorthodoxy actually comes from all the small(and big) usability nightmares that I can not bring myself to tolerate while working in a desktop environment(so, created new ones - like bitmap-based context trees ;)

by wxw 3mo ago

piker 3mo ago

In that case is there not some open harness that demand can coalesce around?

Maxatar 3mo ago
There are but then you're required to pay API prices for them which can end up costing significant multiples of the price of the subscription.
- jaggederest 3mo ago
  I am confused why they don't just offer a subscription with bring-your-own-harness, that would be a differentiator from claude/codex I think.
  - sroussey 3mo ago
    Negative margins to have you hooked on someone else’s software?
    - jaggederest 3mo ago
      I am gently presuming that they are not selling tokens at a loss in their all-you-can-eat plans like the frontier models are, but maybe I'm wrong.
  - bglusman 3mo ago
    Actually unless they’ve changed substantially Kimi kind of does this? It’s not as advertised/focused on and the API is a little nonstandard making it hard to plug some things into, but, unlike Claude they’ll actually give you an API key you can use directly as part of your unmetered subscription. I played with it for a month or two out of curiosity, it ls not a bad value though a bit brittle and stuff
  - john01dav 3mo ago
    The Chinese api prices are already so cheap that that is arguably not needed. You can also get $10/month opencode go (which officially can be used with any harness) with basically every major open weight model running inference in a place that I deem more trustworthy than the subject-to-Chinese-law inference options (but research this for yourself, there are some asterisks). This is what I use (in opencode) when I want an agent for personal use. Even if I'm being fairly intense with my usage by my standards anyway), I haven't managed to run out (yet), although I usually use the cheaper models (deepseek v4 is my favorite, and I've used both flash and pro). From the FAQ: > The plan is designed primarily for international users, with models hosted in the US, EU, and Singapore for stable global access. Our providers follow a zero-retention policy and do not use your data for model training. And: > Yes, you can use Go with any agent. Follow the setup instructions in your preferred coding agent.
    - wasfgwp 3mo ago
      Isn’t OpenCode just reselling Deepseek’s tokens over the same API? For v4-pro the prices from other providers on OpenRouter are way higher so what else could it be? Opencode Go already seems extremely unprofitable if people use up at least 30% of their monthly tokens so its hard to imagine they’d go with several times more expensive inference provider yet show Deepseek pricing on their page.
      - john01dav 3mo ago
        They may have a bespoke deal with someone. They may be losing money. They may have believed a claim from Deepseek about not storing things more than they should. It may be something else. AFAIK no third party audit has been done so all that we have is what they say.
  - wasfgwp 3mo ago
    I think that pretty much all Chinese providers do that? And Codex obviously allows that as well. Anthropic is pretty the main exception.
Gigachad 3mo ago
Vs code copilot lets you bring your own api key for services like open router. But it usually only makes sense to do this with the Chinese models because OpenAI/Google/Anthropic heavily punish you for not using their proprietary lock in harness.

fttt 3mo ago

Yup they have a cost advantage. They just need to be good enough and just copy. Sorry american labs - it’s the beginning of the end.

OutOfHere 3mo ago
American labs will do fine with monthly subscriptions costing $20-300/month. They will not do fine for heavy basic LLM API calls -- it is for this that the cheap API produces substantial savings. Specialized niche provisions, e.g. excellent tool use, reliable structured output, reliable long context, cached and uncached web search, document reads, computer use, integrations, etc. also will take time for the foreign services to be good at.
- PunchTornado 3mo ago
  you are not a trillion company if you just get 20$ a month. if that's the case, the valuation will drop 10x
  - OutOfHere 3mo ago
    I did note $20-300. In particular, domestic employers would surely still spend the upper end of it for each of their engineer staff. If there are 4 million software developers in the US of any job title, and if the employer of each spends $200 per month for the developer, that's $800M per month in revenue.
    - deepvibrations 3mo ago
      [dead]
    - PunchTornado 3mo ago
      you wouldn't get the full market share, but for 1T company with 20pe you still need ~10B of revenue per month. And growing. that is hard from subscriptions alone because there are only so many developers. (google has 40B per month and is a 4T company.)

micromacrofoot 3mo ago

So much is invested in the huge American AI companies that China undercutting them with clones that work almost as well can actually hurt the US economy. They're at the point where copying can get people 90% of what they want anyway, the moat is drying up.

stusmall 3mo ago
If you remove the word "AI" from your post it also describes the last 20 or so years of US/Chinese economic competition. They are real, serious competitor but also there is a lot of value in that last 10%. Some buyers need the best and you can charge a premium for it. The speed in which a copier can catch up to a leader is faster than every before, but everything is faster these days. I think the threat is if can these labs catch up and pass American labs while keeping costs low, but I don't see that happening.
- ajross 3mo ago
  > the last 20 or so years of US/Chinese economic competition Only with some industries, mostly electronics and light manufacturing. The rest of the history of software products doesn't look like this at all. China cloned Amazon and Meta fairly well (but only within their local/captured markets) but not Microsoft or Google and absolutely not Apple. Entertainment and culture exports are still effectively zero (like, what, three blockbuster films?) where the US, Japan and Korea define pop across the globe. Heavy industry is mixed, with decent success in consumer vehicles now but little purchase in stuff like heavy equipment or shipbuilding. Basically it's complicated, and not really a point well suited to that kind of generalism.
  - cgio 3mo ago
    Not British, but taking UK out of the definition of pop, is a bit too rough a cut. Also France. Look at the queues outside pop-glamorous stores. And was pop-art a pop artefact? Is TikTok redefining pop? Movies is an old measure, and even US has fallen with just franchise dominating. I think as a globe we are much more integrated and co-dependent, occasionally also in bad ways, than we appreciate.

TacticalCoder 3mo ago

> Their bread and butter and claim-to-fame will continue to be low-cost, near-frontier models, ... K3 is beating Fable on several benchmarks. So I take it you don't consider Fable 5 to be frontier. What are the frontier models?

adventured 3mo ago
People endlessly claimed the same thing about DeepSeek upon its release. they claim it every single time a very large cutting edge model is released out of China. It's a combination of propaganda, some truth, and the faux open culture desperation to see big tech get destroyed (somehow better if big China takes its place instead).
- TacticalCoder 3mo ago
  https://arena.ai/leaderboard/code https://arena.ai/leaderboard/code (that's just one, there are others... and several are claiming that those saying "yes sure it's just as good, but it uses more tokens" ain't really true either). And I don't think anyone is excited about China releasing anything: I think people like the idea of open-weights.

thomasahle 3mo ago

> duping is a great way to show people that even the app layer can be commoditized Everyone is already cloning the app layer. There are 30+ claude-code clone, and codex work already cloned cowork, grok and gemini is doing the same.

CookieCrisp 3mo ago
I highly recommend to anyone that uses them a lot - try to clone your own. I’ve got mine fully formed into how I want it, with features I haven’t seen anywhere else yet and with integration into everything I work with. We’ve lived in a world where every app had to fit enough people well enough - but now we live in a world where an app can be molded to be absolutely perfect for just you!
- theplumber 3mo ago
  This is the way. Guess what am I working right now? My own “Work” app that will be better than anything else available today!
  - rush86999 3mo ago
    Same here! https://github.com/rush86999/atom https://github.com/rush86999/atom
    - theplumber 3mo ago
      Looks like the thing I am building but of course mine will be slightly different. It would be great if we could all meet to show off and discuss our AI stuff.
- jascha_eng 3mo ago
  How did you build your own coding agent? What language/framework did you use?
  - crystal_revenge 3mo ago

w4yai 3mo ago

> It's clearly a dupe of Claude/Codex products Have you seen Kimi Code ? It's hard to believe it's a different code than Claude Code.

cadamsdotcom 3mo ago

Some paradigms are simply ergonomic. Sometimes there's only one UX people will accept. No one would buy a car steered with pedals; even if that is better (hey planes do it!) - every car maker is "copying" steering wheels and putting them on their cars. Is it controversial? If not why not?

mh- 3mo ago
It wasn't controversial because there was about 200 years of prior art from sailing ships. (Before the wheel, ships were steered with tillers - which early cars also tried, interface-wise.)

zkmon 3mo ago

I think we need to stop using the term "dupe" as if there was some originality somewhere that was not built upon or copied what already existed.

sdiepend 3mo ago
"Everything is a Remix" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRHRUNpWzAY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRHRUNpWzAY
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
QuantumGood 3mo ago
"Good artists copy, great artists steal, the best artists make lies seem true." – Steve Jobs. Actually, Jobs self-servingly refactored then misattributed to Picasso the line, "Good artists copy, great artists steal." Jobs did seem to properly remarket Picasso's intent, though, as Picasso had said: "When there's anything to steal, I steal." "What does it mean, an artist copies? It is normal. The important thing is to do it better." "Art is a series of masterly thefts."
- geniium 3mo ago
  Thanks for making me smile I love that quote and like to share it often with people around me
  - QuantumGood 3mo ago
    Love the AI format with obvious misunderstanding to this and all your other comments; makes it much easier to find AI bots like yourself.
- goolz 3mo ago
  That last line is wonderful! Thank you for this man. I honestly like the original more despite it's wordiness.

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

the-mitr 3mo ago

Copying and reinterpreting/reimplementing successful technologies and processes is the bedrock of human civilization

asdaqopqkq 3mo ago

weird to all it a dupe, these are new paradigms, it's like saying BMW duped Mercedes Benz cause they both make stuff on 4 wheels

idontneedcoffee 3mo ago

I want to believe I work on something creative in this space (even though, the current UI was never "meant to be" and (d?)evolved from a substrate of cheaply available UI components and laziness). THen again, much of the unorthodoxy actually comes from all the small(and big) usability nightmares that I can not bring myself to tolerate while working in a desktop environment(so, created new ones - like bitmap-based context trees ;)