Coding

AI coding tools are genuinely great and genuinely dangerous, often in the same suggestion. They will write in thirty seconds something that would have taken you twenty minutes, and it will contain a subtle bug you would never have written yourself. Here is the workflow I actually use to get the speed without shipping the mistakes.

"Agent" is the most abused word in AI right now. Vendors slap it on anything that calls an API twice. So let us be plain: an AI agent is a model that can take actions in a loop, decide what to do next based on the result, and keep going until a goal is met or it gives up. That is it. The interesting question is not what they are. It is when you should let one loose.

Coding assistant comparisons usually happen on toy problems with clean answers, which is exactly why they are useless. So I did the opposite. I took one genuinely annoying real bug, the kind that spans a few files and does not announce itself, and pointed three assistants at it: Claude, GPT, and Microsoft new MAI coding model in Copilot. Here is how they actually did.

Kimi K2 belongs to my favorite category of model: the one that makes you recheck the pricing page because the numbers look like a typo. Near-frontier reasoning, notably cheaper than the big names, and it gets to the answer using fewer tokens than its predecessor. Mostly, it holds up. Mostly.

Microsoft did something quietly significant: it dropped its own MAI-Code-1-Flash model into GitHub Copilot, the coding assistant a lot of us use every day. This is a review of how it actually feels to code with, not how it looks in a keynote, because those are very different things.

Moonshot released Kimi K2.7 Code, a trillion-parameter coding model, and buried in the announcement was the number that actually matters: it reaches its answers using roughly 30 percent fewer reasoning tokens than its predecessor. In a world obsessed with capability scores, efficiency is the upgrade people underrate, and it is quietly the more useful one.

xAI reportedly acquired the company behind Cursor, the AI coding editor, for $60 billion in all stock. You can argue about the number all day. What you cannot argue with is the message it sends: the smart money has decided the value in AI is no longer in the model. It is in the thing wrapped around it.