I Tried Kimi K3 Inside Claude Code

× Kimi K3 is Moonshot’s new 2.8-trillion-parameter model, with native vision and a one-million-token context window. Moonshot calls it the first open model at this scale and says the weights will be released by July 27. Its own launch post is also unusually candid: it says K3 still trails Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol overall, and that its user experience is not yet at the same level. While I was writing this, Alibaba announced Qwen 3.8, another very large model headed for an open-weight release. This is also shortly after Thinking Machines Lab released Inkling, a 975-billion-parameter US model with 41 billion active parameters and full weights available. Kimi is not a one-off anymore. There is now a queue. I have burned millions of tokens through Claude Code by now. My config works, the tools are where I expect them to be, and I know rhythm of the harness. So I kept Claude Code and using OpenRouter, I routed the requests to Kimi K3. × First impression: slow It felt slow. Very slow, at…