What's people's experience of using MiniMax for coding?
I had a really bad time with it. I use (real) Claude Code for work so I know what a good model feels like. MiniMax's token plan is nice but the quality is really far from Claude models.
I needed to constantly "remind" it to get things done. Even for a four sentence prompt in a session that is well below the context window, MiniMax would ignore half of it. This happens all the time. (This is Claude Code + MiniMax API, set up using official instructions)
Basically, if I say get A, B and C done, it will only do A and B. I say, you still need to do C, so it does C but reverts the code for A.
Things that Claude can usually one shot takes 5 iterations with MiniMax.
I ended up switching to Claude to get one of my personal projects done.
I haven't tried MiniMax but Claude has gotten seriously nerfed lately. A few weeks ago I could code all week on the $100/mo plan without getting close to the limit, now I consumed half the limit in the first day.
Ridiculous, my company has committed to $200k annual plans and they changed the deal mid-way. We'll have to see about a refund.
I love it. It's not quite as good as Sonnet but it's quick, and Minimax 2.5 is like 1/4 the cost of Haiku. With enough of a harness around it, almost any breed of monkey can be coerced into producing excellent typewriter work. GLM 5 and 5.1 are other really competitive options on the price/performance curve
I had a really bad time with it. I use (real) Claude Code for work so I know what a good model feels like. MiniMax's token plan is nice but the quality is really far from Claude models.
I needed to constantly "remind" it to get things done. Even for a four sentence prompt in a session that is well below the context window, MiniMax would ignore half of it. This happens all the time. (This is Claude Code + MiniMax API, set up using official instructions)
Basically, if I say get A, B and C done, it will only do A and B. I say, you still need to do C, so it does C but reverts the code for A.
Things that Claude can usually one shot takes 5 iterations with MiniMax.
I ended up switching to Claude to get one of my personal projects done.