Comment by wkcheng

16 hours ago

It would be super useful to have more specific analyses of what areas the model is good at. I'd like to know when I should reach for this model instead of Anthropic's or OpenAI's.

For example, Opus 5.5 is better at UI design than Sol. Anyone who has used both models knows that, but it's not something you can look up anywhere.

I'm sure that there's a need for this kind of benchmarking, not just for coding.

One things Kimi is useful for is accessing/querying websites that have paywalls or try to prevent use by AI agents. It is aggressive and persistent for that, though not always successful.

Not sure if this is benchmarkable besides for the own person deciding which one they like more. Models difference is more about taste, preferences and prompt style.

  • Furthermore, "UI design" is not a narrow enough category, I think. Sure, statistically significant differences in performance between models do manifest when benchmarking against "UI design", but there's still just so much variance within the category. Opus 5.5 can have excellent one-shot results, but totally shit the bed when it's placed in an existing codebase and should uphold the UI/UX conventions, design language, and existing component primitives already established in an app.

    But that's just the obvious. There are task by task differences (component by component, page by page, context by context) that the model is worse and better at, even though they are all within the general category of UI design.

    I honestly don't have the clarity of mind to explain this coherently, but the crux of my point is that there's a huge variation in it's performance in different contexts, often ones that seem near similar, and in result, even Sol can beat Opus 5.5 in some variations of UI design.

    And this is my problem in benchmarking and comparing model performance in general. Presently, we try to create broad categories to benchmark against, create a set of tasks, and then average out the results. That works generally, but it's kind of misleading and it's partly what drives people to feel a disconnect between benchmarks numbers and real world usage on their specific tasks.

    It's such a messy field that it's kind of maddening.

  • I had a friend yesterday tell me he likes the way Claude writes and finds it easier to understand compared to Gemini. But he mostly doesn't use Claude for coding. Whereas I find Claude insufferable in writing often and prefer Gemini for writing. But I don't use Gemini for coding.

    Familiarity breeds contempt.