The blog of Kilo Code, an open source AI coding agent, with model benchmarks, product news, and commentary on AI coding tools.
HN commenters link it for head-to-head model comparisons, such as DeepSeek V4 against Opus 4.7, and for its post on Claude possibly distilling Qwen.
What a lot of people don’t mention here is the choice of an AI model.
The key word in the OP post is “Claude”. Anthropic has 2 amazing AI models (Sonnet, Opus), however they’re just a part of a much bigger picture.
When using AI for programming, you’re essentially interacting with AI models. The quality of output you get really depends on the model at the end of the day. Claude Code is optimized for models from Anthropic. You also have model-agnostic agents like Cursor and Kilo Code (disclaimer: I work at Kilo) where you can easily switch up models and see which one works the best for you converting an old jQuery + Django project into SvelteKit.
This area is moving at a crazy rate. Just the last 2 weeks alone, there were 3 main AI model versions released (first Gemini 3, then Opus 4.5, then GPT-5.2). I wrote a piece comparing their performance across 3 coding tasks [1]
So my advice is to also experiment a lot with the models because the quality can vary wildly depending on your stack.
[1] https://blog.kilo.ai/p/we-tested-gpt-52pro-vs-opus-45-vs
>Starting from zero today, how would someone quickly get upto speed with the latest and greatest AI tooling on an extremely limited budget?
Z.AI, Moonshot.AI, Xiaomi, Minimax, Alibaba all have coding plans that allows a massive usage of GLM 5.1, Kimi k2.6, Minimax M2.7, Qwen 3.6 Plus, Xiaomi MiMo v2.5 Pro for cheap.
Pair those coding plans with the harness of choice including Claude Code and you are good to go.
Also, Nvidia is offering free access to top models for free through NIM - but you have 40 RPM limits. https://blog.kilo.ai/p/nvidia-nim-kilo-code-free-kimi-k25
Kilo (the open source coding agent) tested Deepseek v4 Pro and Flash vs Opus 4.7 and Kimi K2[1].
It did ok, but scored substantially less than Opus. It also cost nearly as much, even with the current launch promo pricing for Deepseek.
That cost is interesting - I've seen similar things with Sonnet vs Opus, and in my own benchmarking there are some models that benchmark well, seem to have a good price but use so many tokens they cost just as much as "more expensive" models.
[1] https://blog.kilo.ai/p/we-tested-deepseek-v4-pro-and-flash
https://blog.kilo.ai/p/did-claude-opus-48-distill-alibabas
it happens to all models…when the internet is increasingly generated, things happen
More technical introduction worth reading: https://blog.kilo.ai/p/the-elephant-is-out-of-the-bag-meet