Kilo Code AI says MiniMax M3 matched Claude Opus 4.8 on a code audit for $0.07
The open-source AI coding assistant company, founded by Scott Breitenother and Sytse Sijbrandij, says its self-run test found 13 of 17 planted bugs with MiniMax M3, tying the cheapest Claude run it priced at $1.30.
By Ryan Merket · Published
Primary source: X
Why it matters
Kilo's test underscores a growing buyer problem in AI tooling: the strongest model is not always the most economical model for every software task. If cheaper frontier-adjacent models can catch the same class of high-severity bugs at scale, developer-tool startups can compete on routing, evaluation, and workflow rather than simply reselling the most expensive model endpoint.
Kilo Code AI (@kilocode), the open-source AI coding assistant company founded by Scott Breitenother and Sytse Sijbrandij, said Saturday in a nine-post thread on X that MiniMax M3 matched Anthropic's cheapest Claude Opus 4.8 run on a code-audit test at a fraction of the cost, finding 13 of 17 planted bugs for $0.07.…
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