> they always disappoint in actual use.

I’ve switched to using Kimi 2.5 for all of my personal usage and am far from disappointed.

Aside from being much cheaper than the big names (yes, I’m not running it locally, but like that I could) it just works and isn’t a sycophant. Nice to get coding problems solved without any “That’s a fantastic idea!”/“great point” comments.

At least with Kimi my understanding is that beating benchmarks was a secondary goal to good developer experience.