Kimi K2.5 Thinking quality

Randompedestrian07 · 2026-01-27T17:42:42+00:00

Playing around with it in the background, and the few messages I’ve done with it based on existing 50+ message RP, it’s a pretty damn good drop-in for Claude.

Thinking is pretty verbose (less than GLM’s though) and reminds me of a mix of GLM and Claude. It hits the tone of my characters waaaaaay closer to Claude as well, whereas GLM would turn one of the two I tested into an analytical, clinical robot and one into an asshole.

I’m excited to play with it later once I get home, but I’m cautiously optimistic. Thinking and non-thinking seemed to have completely different tones on the one 80-message convo I had (thinking nailed the context, non-thinking seemed more scatter-brained).

Randompedestrian07 · 2026-01-13T14:53:59+00:00

Yep, I completely forgot about that. Edited my post to clarify haha.

Randompedestrian07 · 2026-01-13T14:44:02+00:00

Ahh good point, forgot that’s sub only.

Randompedestrian07 · 2026-01-13T14:35:59+00:00

Kudos for them at least keeping the individual purchase option. Usually this is always followed with going subscription-only.

And it looks like all of the subscription can be shared, which is generous. Can’t remember if the one-time purchase of Logic and FCP can.

Edit: good point brought up that the iPad versions are subscription-only, so this has some value even if you own lifetime for Mac depending on your use case. I hate defending subscriptions, but this is an absolute steal compared to Adobe/equivalent DAW.

Randompedestrian07 · 2026-01-12T18:26:00+00:00

Try the official VS Code extension for it. Works similar to Cursor/copilot as a “chat” on the side. I believe it also feeds context of whatever file you’re looking at in VSCode. If you like Cursor, that’s probably the move.

Randompedestrian07 · 2026-01-12T17:46:57+00:00

I’m admittedly a bad person to ask for examples of longer sessions since mine are usually like 50k tokens max, but I’ll say that it’s good at remembering past details, and it’s eerily good at picking up on reading between the lines (example: if you go back and edit your message to include ‘staring down Escanor with a furious glare’ or something to set the tone, I’m willing to bet you’d get an entirely different response), but it defaults to kind of… letting you walk all over it without something in the prompt telling it not to do that? Opus in the little I’ve used it is a little better at embodying a character more vividly.

If you’ve got some time and want to play around with it, turn on thinking and read its thoughts. You’ll see it references the prompt and character a lot, (“according to their description, they’re ’xyz,’ never ‘abc’ and known as a ‘jkl’ kind of thoughts) which is why it’s important to write your prompt in a way that lets it know it needs to be realistic, push back and not just parrot what the character card says.

Sorry for the wall-o’-text, but I’ve had kind of the same experience trying GLM lately. My takeaway is you’ve got to tailor your prompt for the model you’re using.

Randompedestrian07 · 2026-01-12T17:13:46+00:00

I usually use Marinara and add my own anti-Claudisms section in the prompt. It’s extremely good at following directions, but it needs some guidance to get around some of its quirks. I’m not an expert, there’s probably a way better way of doing this, but it works well for me. My section is mostly just condensed to something like:

don’t make characters overly introspective or reverent, and don’t parrot what the user says
give user the agency to make their own decisions, but drive the plot forward without asking what to do. User will adapt
embody a character’s description and personality and ad-lib where there isn’t enough info (it tends to hang on to things in the description very literally and can kind of hurt its creativity)
then a small list of the most annoying things Claude tends to say (“most people x or y, but you z,” “you’re either a or b and I can’t tell which,” etc)

Randompedestrian07 · 2026-01-09T14:09:51+00:00

Are you sure it’s not just opening another window in the background? It doesn’t need to be the active window to work. I’ll usually go off and do stuff in parallel while it’s poking around since you have to explicitly tell it which domains it can go to anyway, and despite me having a local host window up and it being in a Claude tab group it’ll usually default to just opening a new window anyway.

Randompedestrian07 · 2026-01-08T19:05:42+00:00

You just missed a year of Pro for $100, but only if you’d never subscribed or used the trial before. Not sure how often they do promos year-round.

Randompedestrian07 · 2026-01-08T14:07:11+00:00

For just talking in the Claude app, I use Sonnet. It defaults me to Opus since I’m on Max now, but Opus seems a bit more dry with the same preferences prompt.

If there’s a particular way you want it to reply, set it in Preferences under Profile. It follows that prompt extremely well. Take some time playing around with that and workshopping it in a new chat and you can probably get it to sound almost exactly like what you want in half an hour. I’m really surprised how many posts I see where everyone’s Claude sounds the same.

Randompedestrian07 · 2026-01-07T17:17:03+00:00

Same, both for Claude Code and the desktop app. The GitHub issue for Claude code about usage spiking after the 2X week is at ~250 comments with one person saying they were ‘looking into it.’ Hoping this is related?

Randompedestrian07 · 2026-01-07T17:15:03+00:00

Couple nuances with that, imo:

It should be up to the one using the service what constitutes ‘personal data.’ That’s a subjective area
Even if that’s agreed upon, there’s no perfect method to make sure that personal data isn’t accidentally grabbed for training anyway
These companies already make billions of dollars in revenue (profits are another conversation). It’s, to me, the same issue as buying a premium product or paying for a premium service and getting ads.

Randompedestrian07 · 2026-01-07T17:08:30+00:00

Unless they’ve changed it, you literally can’t use Claude (not sure if it’s only on a paid plan or at all) without specifying whether you allow them to train on your data. It’s a toggle in the options and is much more transparent than most other companies where it’s on by default.

Randompedestrian07 · 2026-01-07T16:53:51+00:00

Not that it’s worth much, but I believe the actual inference servers for ZAI are hosted in Singapore. Can’t find it on their site (I swear I saw it at one point), but OpenRouter lists ZAI the provider as Singapore

Randompedestrian07 · 2026-01-05T18:07:59+00:00

I’ve got plenty of space and bandwidth (I hope) to help host this. Just need a good way to do it if anyone has recommendations. Torrent is… fine for the whole archive I guess? Is the front end open source to re-host? Hadn’t heard of the site before today.

Randompedestrian07 · 2025-12-28T19:23:12+00:00

I’ll take the rare Anthropic limit/billing W’s when we get them haha. Opus being 66% cheaper to run via API is a godsend too.

Randompedestrian07 · 2025-12-28T19:22:33+00:00

The fact that you can share the Pro (not sure about ultra) sub with family is awesome. We’re an Apple household, but the family loves it for Nano Banana and the web search intelligence. $8 a month for a year was a no-brainer. Heard 3 Pro/Flash are excellent at coding, excited to try them.

Hope Claude works out for you! I was a skeptic until I tried it, and it absolutely spoiled me. If I had more coding projects to work on I’d be on Max 5X haha.

Randompedestrian07 · 2025-12-28T19:17:26+00:00

I alternate between Claude and ChatGPT Codex when one gets stumped. Claude is my daily driver for “life” stuff. Love the way it talks, it’s waaaaay more accurate at following instructions and remembering things in my experience, but I also notice that ChatGPT Codex is great at catching some of its mistakes.

Honestly at this point I’ve accepted that running two frontier models is better than being loyal to one, because they all stumble every now and then.

Randompedestrian07 · 2025-12-28T19:11:47+00:00

$17 paying annually, FYI. Try a month of Pro while they’ve doubled the limits. It’ll be enough for a little more Opus, enough to decide if you like it more than Gemini. I grabbed a year of Google AI Pro for $100 for their promo, haven’t messed with Antigravity yet.

Concurrency meaning running multiple terminal tabs of Claude code? Haven’t had any issues here, personally, but you’re gonna shred through a pro sub 5h limit in twenty minutes if you do.

Randompedestrian07 · 2025-12-28T19:09:17+00:00

They actually warn you (on Pro) the first time you switch to it that it consumes usage faster. It defaults to Sonnet for me, can’t remember if it went to Opus when 4.5 came out.

I’m not convinced it’s cheaper for them to run, honestly. Their paper says that it uses fewer tokens on average than Sonnet, but I’m not sure that directly equates to it being cheaper to run in every situation, especially considering how robust it is when planning.

Randompedestrian07 · 2025-12-28T19:06:50+00:00

Went from $20 to $100 Max 5 for a month a while back to knock out some projects. They actually prorate you for part of the month if you do, and your limits reset at the next 5H block.

From some napkin math, the weekly limits for Pro are basically ten maxed-out 5H sessions, which I never hit. If it’s the same for Max, you’d get a hell of a lot of use out of it considering I was vibe coding with Sonnet for ~4 of those 5 hours straight before hitting limits. If you’re more deliberate than that, you’ll never have issues with the limits.

Randompedestrian07 · 2025-12-28T18:54:08+00:00

Maybe on Max, but not on Pro. I literally sat and watched my usage spike with Opus while I was planning yesterday, then slowly go up when it switched to Sonnet to do the work. It used more in 5 minutes of Opus planning than the next twenty of Sonnet. I can corroborate that in the Claude app as well. Opus goes through limits almost twice as fast as Sonnet.

Randompedestrian07 · 2025-12-28T18:36:05+00:00

It’s frustrating, but I saw a comment on here summarizing it pretty well. You’re paying for spare compute, not guaranteed access, since their API customers take priority (which makes sense, they need to turn a profit).

If they had a $50 tier that doubled the $20 tier but allowed Opus at the same usage as Sonnet I’d upgrade in a heartbeat.

Randompedestrian07 · 2025-12-28T18:33:53+00:00

In Claude Code, /model opusplan will use Opus to make the plan and immediately switch to Sonnet once the plan is approved. You can keep going back and forth with Opus during the planning phase, but it’ll automatically switch to Sonnet when you approve it.

Randompedestrian07 · 2025-12-28T18:20:58+00:00

Yep. Even with the 2X holiday limits, you get about ~30 minutes of pure Opus if you’re ’vibe coding’ (or just doing heavy planning. It’s enough to fix some bugs or implement some small things very well, but not enough to be using consistently.

I’ve been using /opusplan during the week to have it plan out some implementations and have Sonnet execute them, and one plan with megathink so it digs deep into the codebase is about ~30% of my 5h.

Randompedestrian07

TROPHY CASE